Comparison within pairs promotes analogical abstraction in three-month-olds

Erin M. Anderson*, Yin Juei Chang, Susan Hespos, Dedre Gentner

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

38 Scopus citations

Abstract

This research tests whether analogical learning is present before language comprehension. Three-month-old infants were habituated to a series of analogous pairs, instantiating either the same relation (e.g., AA, BB, etc.) or the different relation (e.g., AB, CD, etc.), and then tested with further exemplars of the relations. If they can distinguish the familiar relation from the novel relation, even with new objects, this is evidence for analogical abstraction across the study pairs. In Experiment 1, we did not find evidence of analogical abstraction when 3-month-olds were habituated to six pairs instantiating the relation. However, in Experiment 2, infants showed evidence of analogical abstraction after habituation to two alternating pairs (e.g., AA, BB, AA, BB…). Further, as with older groups, rendering individual objects salient disrupted learning the relation. These results demonstrate that 3-month-old infants are capable of comparison and abstraction of the same/different relation. Our findings also place limits on the conditions under which these processes are likely to occur. We discuss implications for theories of relational learning.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)74-86
Number of pages13
JournalCognition
Volume176
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2018

Funding

This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-1423917 awarded to Susan J. Hespos, NSF SLC Grant SBE-1041707 and 1729720 to the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), by ONR Grant N00014-92-J-1098 to Dedre Gentner, and by a US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences training grant (Multidisciplinary Program in Education Science) # R305B140042 to Erin Anderson. We are indebted to parents who agreed to have their infants participate in the research. We thank members of the Infant Cognition Lab for help with data collection. We also thank Ruxue Shao, Christian de Hoyos and Christine Schlaug for their insightful comments.

Keywords

  • Cognitive development
  • Infants
  • Relational processing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Developmental and Educational Psychology
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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