It is known that the comprehension of spatial prepositions

involves the deployment of visual attention. For example, consider the

sentence “The salt is to the left of the stove”. Researchers [29, 30] have

theorized that people must shift their attention from the stove (the reference object, RO) to the salt (the located object, LO) in order to com-

prehend the sentence. Such a shift was also implicitly assumed in the

Attentional Vector Sum (AVS) model by [35], a cognitive model that

computes an acceptability rating for a spatial preposition given a display that contains an RO and an LO. However, recent empirical findings

showed that a shift from the RO to the LO is not necessary to understand

a spatial preposition ( [3], see also [15, 38]). In contrast, these findings

suggest that people perform a shift in the reverse direction (i.e., from

the LO to the RO). Thus, we propose the reversed AVS (rAVS) model,

a modified version of the AVS model in which attention shifts from the

LO to the RO. We assessed the AVS and the rAVS model on the data

from [35] using three model simulation methods. Our simulations show

that the rAVS model performs as well as the AVS model on these data

while it also integrates the recent empirical findings. Moreover, the rAVS

model achieves its good performance while being less flexible than the

AVS model. (This article is an updated and extended version of the paper [23] presented at the 8th International Conference on Agents and

Artificial Intelligence in Rome, Italy. The authors would like to thank

Holger Schultheis for helpful discussions about the additional model simulation.)