title: The early emergence and puzzling decline of relational reasoning: Effects of knowledge and search on inferring abstract concepts.
abstract: We 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. Walker and Gopnik (2014) 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.
authors.affiliation: University of California, San Diego, Department of Psychology, 9500 Gillman, # 0109, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109, United States. Electronic address: carenwalker@ucsd.edu.
authors.forename: Caren M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Walker
authors.affiliation: Stanford University, Department of Psychology, 450 Serra Mall, Jordan Hall, Building 420, Stanford, CA 94305, United States.
authors.forename: Sophie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bridgers
authors.affiliation: University of California, Berkeley, Department of Psychology, 3210 Tolman Hall, Room 1221, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States.
authors.forename: Alison
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gopnik
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007858:Learning; D011340:Problem Solving; D002666:Psychology, Child
keywords: Bayesian inference; Causal learning; Cognitive development; Explanation; Relational reasoning