Early diversity in abstract thought: Context shapes the developmental trajectory of relational reasoning

• In Event: Cultural perspectives on relational learning: Variation in parental input and children’s performance

Abstract

Early abstract reasoning has typically been characterized by a “relational shift,” in which children initially focus on object features, but increasingly come to interpret similarity in terms of structured relations. An alternative possibility is that this shift reflects a learned bias, rather than a typical waypoint along a universal developmental trajectory. If so, consistent differences in the focus on objects or relations in a child’s learning environment could create distinct patterns of relational reasoning, influencing the type of hypotheses that are privileged and applied. Specifically, children in the U.S. may be subject to culture-specific influences that bias their reasoning toward objects, to the detriment of relations. We present three studies exploring relational reasoning in a population with less object-centric experience.
In these experiments, we compared a context in which the culture-specific learning environment highlights objects and object features (English speakers in the United States) to another context highlighting relational structure (Mandarin Chinese speakers in China). For English learners in the United States, a cultural focus on objects (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Kuwabara & Smith, 2012) and linguistic focus on learning nouns (Hoyos, Shao, & Gentner, 2016; Waxman et al., 2013) may direct children’s attention to objects and object properties. Conversely, Mandarin learners in China may be subject to an emphasis on relations that is characteristic of some East Asian cultural contexts (Kuwabara & Smith, 2012; Richland, Chan, Morrison, & Au, 2010) and a linguistic bias toward verbs rather than nouns (Tardif, 1996; Chan et al., 2011), which could direct their attention toward relations. Accordingly, the variation between these culture-specific learning environments presents two natural conditions with which to examine the role of contextual factors on the development of relational reasoning.
In Experiment 1, we find that 3-year-olds in China succeed in a relational task that their U.S. counterparts fail (a causal version of the relational match-to-sample task, see Figure 1; U.S. 35/76 correct, two-tailed binomial P > 0.1 and China 56/77 correct, two-tailed binomial P < 0.01). Experiment 2 surveys performance in the same task in children from 18 to 48 months, providing evidence for different developmental trajectories across these distinct learning contexts. Cultural context was a significant predictor of performance in this task (binomial logistic regression, β = 3.27; P = 0.05), and there was a significant interaction of cultural context and age (β = −0.11; P = 0.01), such that accuracy decreased over the 18-48 month window for children in the United States but was maintained for those in China, as shown in Figure 2. Finally, in Experiment 3, we find that Chinese 3-year-olds exhibit a bias toward relational solutions in an ambiguous context, while those in the U.S. prefer object-based solutions (China 41/60 relational, U.S. 20/56; two-tailed P < 0.01, Fisher’s exact). These differences suggest distinct biases in abstract thinking, and imply that the development of abstract thought is more context-sensitive than previously thought. Ongoing work is designed to situate these differences in relational reasoning relative to other linguistic and cultural contrasts between the U.S. and China.

Authors

• Alexandra Carstensen, University of California - San Diego
  Presenting Author

• Caren M. Walker, University of California - San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author