title: Comparison and mapping facilitate relation discovery and predication.
abstract: Relational concepts play a central role in human perception and cognition, but little is known about how they are acquired. For example, how do we come to understand that physical force is a higher-order multiplicative relation between mass and acceleration, or that two circles are the same-shape in the same way that two squares are? A recent model of relational learning, DORA (Discovery of Relations by Analogy; Doumas, Hummel & Sandhofer, 2008), predicts that comparison and analogical mapping play a central role in the discovery and predication of novel higher-order relations. We report two experiments testing and confirming this prediction.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States of America. leonidas@hawaii.edu
authors.forename: Leonidas A A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Doumas
authors.forename: John E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Hummel
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*