Approximating Cognitive Representations Using Space

In everyday life, people intuitively use space to make meaningful distinctions between objects. In this paper, we present a novel, free-to-use on-line experimental paradigm that capitalizes on these intuitions: GRIS (Generating Representations in Space). In GRIS experiments, participants manipulate a set of objects (text, audio, images) and place them on canvases. Following an introduction to the paradigm, we present three studies which demonstrate how experiments in the GRIS paradigm can both a) replicate prior psycholinguistic results and b) reveal nuanced insights about human and computational representations.