Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Education has a profound impact on human cognition. People who have participated in education are better at solvingabstract reasoning tasks, can flexibly transfer knowledge across domains and are better at explaining their solutions.However, the properties of education that are responsible for these cognitive changes are poorly understood. We explorethe hypothesis that a structured education consisting of a cumulative, compositional curricular learning regime usingculturally constructed concepts and tools can account for many of these observations. In particular, we demonstrate thata connectionist model that learns to solve difficult analogical reasoning problems using a structured education is betterat knowledge reuse, while simultaneously providing explanations for solutions. We predict that premature progressionthrough a curriculum, before proficiency in a foundational stage has been established can fundamentally limit the potentialfor subsequent abstract reasoning performance or knowledge transfer ability.