TY - JOUR
T1 - Comparison within pairs promotes analogical abstraction in three-month-olds
AU - Anderson, Erin M.
AU - Chang, Yin Juei
AU - Hespos, Susan
AU - Gentner, Dedre
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by 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. 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
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2018/7
Y1 - 2018/7
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Cognitive development
KW - Infants
KW - Relational processing
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.03.008
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.03.008
M3 - Article
C2 - 29549761
AN - SCOPUS:85053848442
VL - 176
SP - 74
EP - 86
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
SN - 0010-0277
ER -