The early emergence and puzzling decline of relational reasoning: Effects of knowledge and search on inferring abstract concepts

Abstract

a b s t r a c tWe explore the developmental trajectory and underlying mechanisms of abstract relational reasoning. We describe a surprising developmental pattern: Younger learners are better than older ones at inferring abstract causal relations. demonstrated that toddlers are able to infer that an effect was caused by a relation between two objects (whether they are the same or different), rather than by individual kinds of objects. While these findings are consistent with evidence that infants recognize same-different relations, they contrast with a large literature suggesting that older children tend to have difficulty inferring these relations. Why might this be? In Experiment 1a, we demonstrate that while younger children (18-30-month-olds) have no difficulty learning these relational concepts, older children (36-48-month-olds) fail to draw this abstract inference. Experiment 1b replicates the finding with 18-30-month-olds using a more demanding intervention task. Experiment 2 tests whether this difference in performance might be because older children have developed the general hypothesis that individual kinds of objects are causal -the high initial probability of this alternative hypothesis might override the data that favors the relational hypothesis. Providing additional information falsifying the alternative hypothesis improves older children's performance. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrates that prompting for explanations during learning also improves performance, even without any additional information. These findings are discussed in light of recent computational and algorithmic theories of learning.

Discriminating relational and perceptual judgments: Evidence from human toddlers

“…In particular, children in the unfused/relational condition selected the 'same' test pair more often than chance (73%), p = 0.006 (two-tailed, exact binomial). These results replicate previous findings with 18-30-month-olds (Walker & Gopnik, 2014;Walker et al, 2016). However, in contrast with the perceptual account, children of the same age in the fused/single object condition selected at chance (40%), p = 0.27 (two-tailed, exact binomial).…”

“…These findings suggest that early relational competence found here and elsewhere (Walker & Gopnik, 2014;Walker et al, 2016) is unlikely to result from reliance on a low-level perceptual heuristic, and provide evidence for genuine conceptual understanding of 'same' at this young age.…”

“…In particular, pre-verbal infants can be habituated to pairs of same and different objects (Addyman & Mareschal, 2010;Ferry, Hespos, & Gentner, 2015;Hochmann, Mody, & Carey, 2016;Tyrell, Stauffer, & Snowman, 1991), discriminate and generalize patterns of repeated visual or auditory elements (ABA/AAB/ABB) (Dawson & Gerken, 2009;Johnson et al, 2009;Marcus, Vijayan, Bandi Rao, & Vishton, 1999;Saffran, Pollak, Seibel, & Shkolnik, 2007), and provide a conditioned response to pairs of identical stimuli (Hochmann, 2010;Kovács, 2014). Moreover, very young toddlers can apparently use same-different relations in an active causal learning paradigm (Walker & Gopnik, 2014), although this ability declines in the preschool period (Walker, Bridgers, & Gopnik, 2016). In these studies, toddlers, aged 18-30-months, were able to infer same-different relations in a causal version of a match to sample task (i.e., matching AA 0 with BB 0 , not CD, and matching EF with CD, not BB 0 ).…”

“…As a proof of concept, we applied this method to assess human toddlers in a causal match to sample task originally developed by Walker and colleagues (Walker & Gopnik, 2014;Walker et al, 2016). In the current study, children observed two trials in which a pair of 'same' objects, or a fusion of those objects, activated a machine, but a pair or fusion of two 'different' objects did not.…”

Context shapes early diversity in abstract thought

“…23) and corresponding empirical research (24)(25)(26), which suggests that children's ability to infer object-based and relational concepts likely develops more or less in tandem. Based on this evidence, the rational learner account (15) proposes that a child's tendency to select relational or object-based solutions has little to do with domain-specific knowledge or general cognitive maturity, and instead depends upon the probability assigned to each type of hypothesis in a given context.…”