Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Relational schema induction involves a series of learning tasks conforming to a common (group-like) structure. The paradigm contrasts associative versus relational aspects of learning for cognitive, developmental and comparative psychology. Yet, a theory accounting for the relationship between these forms of learning has not been fully developed. We use (mathematical) category theory methods to redress this situation: both forms of learning involve a (universal) construction that differs in terms of ``dimensionality'', i.e. one-dimensional (associative) versus two-dimensional (relational). Accordingly, the development of relational learning pertains to changes in the dimensionality of the underlying relational schemas induced.