Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Relational reasoning is an important component of abstract thought that emerges early in development but shows substantial variation across contexts, with children in the US and China following distinct developmental trajectories in one paradigm between 18m and 4y. To understand the mechanisms through which variation in the learning environment influences the development of relational reasoning, we examine early relational reasoning in Punjabi speakers in India, who share some cultural and linguistic elements of their experience with children in both the US and China. In a causal relational match-to-sample task, we find that 3-year-olds in India exhibit performance that is intermediate to their high-performing peers in China and the relatively poor performance observed in the US at this age. These results suggest complexity and variability in the development of relational reasoning and lay a foundation for future research designed to tease apart the factors associated with early diversity in relational reasoning.