Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What makes humans smart? We think it has to do with our analogical ability—our ability to perceive common relational patterns between different objects, events, or ideas. It is a cornerstone of our higher-order reasoning ability and may have its origins in a relational processing mechanism that allows us to abstract relations using comparison. In this symposium, we present research on the nature of our relational learning ability. We show that findings from infants, preschoolers, elementary school students, and adults reveal common signatures across a wide variety of contexts. These studies provide evidence about how to improve learning of abstract relational concepts and provide insight about how to build better AI models.