COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY lo, 391-421 (1978) Spatial Comprehension and Comparison Processes in Verification Tasks ROBERT J. GLUSHKO University of Califhrniu. Son Diego AND LYNN A. COOPER Cornell Uniwrsitv Two experiments use the sentence-picture verification paradigm to study encoding and comparison processes with spatial information. Subjects decided whether a spatial description of a figure or a geometric figure matched a second figure. Three critical results (the effects of display complexity, the effects of lexical markedness, and the relative speeds of “same” and “different” responses) covaried across four experimental conditions. These results demonstrate that task-specific variables can be the primary determinants of how subjects verify sentences. When the two displays were presented successively and subjects took as much time as they needed to prepare for the test figure, verification time was not affected by the pictorial complexity of the test figure or by the markedness of the relational terms used in the descriptions, and “same” responses were faster than “different” responses. When subjects had less time to study the spatial description before the test picture appeared, the effects of complexity and lexical markedness on verification time increased and were largest when the two displays appeared simultaneously; concurrently, “differents” became faster than “sames.” This pattern of results is not easily handled hy current models for sentence-picture verification. This research was funded primarily by National Science Foundation Grant BMS 75-15773 and National Institutes of Mental Health Small Grant MH 25722-01 to the second author. Experiment 2 was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BMS 76-15024 to David E. Rumelhatt. Some pilot work by the first author was funded by National Science Foundation Grant GB-31971X to Roger Shepard at Stanford University. The first author held a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship while this paper was written. We thank our colleagues at UCSD and elsewhere whose discussion and critical comments shaped and improved this paper; in particular, we acknowledge the help of Jack Catlin, Jim Cunningham, Colin MacLeod, Jay McClelland, Jeff Miller, Allen Munro, Don Norman, Steve Palmer, Peter Podgomy, Dave Rumelhart, Arty Samuel, Roger Shepard, Al Stevens, and an anonymous reviewer. Requests for reprints may be sent to either author: Robert J. Glushko, Department of Psychology C-009, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093; Lynn A. Cooper, Department of Psychology, Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. 391 OOJO-0285/78/0104-0391$05.00/O Copyright 0 1978 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form rererved.