Impedance Effects of Visual and Spatial Content upon Language-to-Logic Translation Accuracy

There is a body of work that suggests that those elements of the cognitive architecture responsible for processing, on the one hand, visual information (essentially visual properties of objects), and, on the other hand, spatial information (spatial relationships between objects), may compete with each other for resources. In this paper, we explore whether and to what degree the processing of visual and spatial information interferes with the task of translation from natural language into logic, a skill that students often find difficult to master. Using a large corpus of student data, we determine correlations between difficulty and the particular properties used in the sentences, with implications for pedagogical design.