Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans exhibit a remarkable ability to learn relational concepts from a small number of examples. On the Synthetic Visual Reasoning Test (SVRT), a collection of 23 problems that require learning relational concepts, people typically discover the relational rules from a handful of examples. An important question is what learning mechanisms underlie the human ability to acquire relational concepts so quickly. Previous work has demonstrated that comparison of examples via analogical mapping underlies rapid relational concept acquisition. Here, we examine whether learners switch to learning strategies that do not involve comparison when cognitive load is high. We conducted two experiments that varied the display format and problem order for the SVRT. When problems are presented in an easy-to-hard order, people learn more efficiently when prior examples are displayed in spatially segregated sets, consistent with the use of analogical mapping as a learning strategy. However, when the problems are presented in a random order, the advantage of spatially segregated displays is eliminated. We propose that when hard problems are encountered early in a problem sequence, analogical mapping becomes too demanding, causing people to fall back on a less efficient learning strategy that does not require the comparison of multiple examples.