Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Contrary to decades of previous research, one recent study suggests that preschoolers can rapidly learn and transfer avariety of relational concepts (e.g., bigger than; smaller than; opposite of) when those relations are operationalized asthe beginning and ending states of causal transformations performed by agents (Goddu, Lombrozo, & Gopnik, in press).Without causal framing, children reverted from relational reasoning to object matching, consistent with findings from manyprevious (non-causal) paradigms. Here, we investigate whether three-year-olds (Experiment 1) and 24- to 30-month-oldtoddlers (Experiment 2) are able to learn and apply relational concepts in a behavioral task where they themselves mustintervene to solve a problem using relational reasoning. Results indicate that children as young as two years of age areable to rapidly learn and generalize relational concepts and use them productively to solve new problems.