Alice Wang¹, Alon Hafri¹; ¹University of Delaware

When a ball is in a box, is it also near the box? Intuition says no: “in-ness” seems to override “near-ness,” as if certain spatial relations cannot coexist. What is the origin of such restrictions? Are they merely constraints on how scenes are described linguistically, or do they reflect a deeper property of how the mind represents spatial relations? As a case study, we examined proximity. Although seemingly a simple metric computation, proximity can also be construed in terms of the categorical near relation, and may therefore be subject to similar constraints as the linguistic use of “near.” We predicted that perceiving containment would interfere with proximity judgments, even when language was task-irrelevant. Across three experiments, participants saw displays with two blue circles and one or more edges and judged which circle was nearer to a blue target edge. In Experiment 1, the circles appeared on opposite sides of a single edge. On containment (IN) trials, the blue edge formed the side of either one or two gray squares: on one-IN trials, one circle was contained by a square, while the other remained outside; on two-IN trials, each circle was contained by its own square. Some trials involved no containment. Despite being directed to ignore non-blue elements, participants were slower and less accurate whenever containment was present. Crucially, one-IN and two-IN trials were equally difficult, ruling out effects of stimulus complexity and object-based warping. Experiment 2 replicated the IN disadvantage using two side-by-side displays, each with its own square and target edge. Experiment 3 addressed an “edge-selection” confound by placing non-IN circles between two edges (one being the target); the IN disadvantage, though reduced, persisted. These results suggest that perceiving containment interferes with proximity computations and reveal that perceptual and linguistic construals of space may be governed by similar constraints.