ABSTRACT
A cognitive functional processing system is proposed which assesses the relationship between any two variables in the environment by taking the partial derivative of an assumed or known response surface for one variable (A) relative to another (B). An experiment in which participants used a dynamic map query system to access information about geographic regions was used to investigate relationships learned and inferred between variables. Thirty undergraduates participated in an experiment in which they were asked to find states that satisfied one, two, and three variable range queries using a dynamic map query system. The results showed that participants were able to code the existence and direction of the gradients between the criterion variables; that is, they were aware of the interrelationships of the search variables. A follow-up experiment was used to demonstrate the ability of the participants to generate new composition rules given the decomposed gradients they had stored from the queries.
