1-198 - Acquisition of Same/Different Relations by Human and Nonhuman Groups

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The acquisition and use of relational concepts is critical to higher-order cognition, and to learning in complex domains. Same and different are among the simplest, most basic relations—yet there is debate on when and how children acquire representations of these relations, what processes allow children to pass same/different tasks, and whether there is continuity between human and non-human representations. This symposium examines children’s, infants’, and non-human animals’ acquisition of same and different from multiple perspectives.

Talk-1 discusses comparative research on same/different reasoning. Previous research has emphasized the role of perceptual cues such as entropy in same-different tasks using large arrays. However, this talk reports evidence of crows passing the classic two-object relational-match-to-sample (RMTS) task. Talk-2 applies the methods used with crows in Talk-1 to 4-and-5-year-olds and proposes that gains on the RMTS task are not due to learning relational representations, but to recognizing the task-relevance of existing representations.

In contrast, the next two talks argue that same/different representations are formed through structure-mapping comparison processes. Talk-3 presents evidence that 4-year-olds represent both same and different, that high performance on the RMTS is not based on symmetry and that, as for same/different, representation of symmetry is facilitated by comparison. Talk-4 builds on findings that infants can abstract same/different relations from a series of alignable pairs (Ferry et al., 2015) and finds that 3-month-olds, whose encoding processes are unstable, can form an abstraction when given a single repeated pair; but older infants, with more stable encoding processes, cannot.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Dedre Gentner, Northwestern University

Individual Presentations

• Comparative Psychology of Relational Cognition - Presenting Author: Edward Wasserman, University of Iowa

• Relational Induction and Stimuli Dimension Effects in the Relational Matching Tasks - Presenting Author: Ivan Kroupin, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Susan Carey, Harvard University

• When and How Children Understand Same/Different Relations - Presenting Author: Ruxue Shao, Northwestern University; Non-Presenting Author: Christian Hoyos, Exponent; Non-Presenting Author: Dedre Gentner, Northwestern University

• When One Exemplar Behaves Like Many - Presenting Author: Erin M Anderson, Northwestern University; Non-Presenting Author: Susan Hespos, Northwestern University; Non-Presenting Author: Dedre Gentner, Northwestern University