Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Current theories of relational learning on structure mappingemphasize the importance of compositional representations,based on the concept’s components and the relations amongthem. We consider the possibility that relational concepts canalso be represented unitarily, whereby the concept is aproperty of the stimulus as a whole. The distinction betweencompositional and unitary representations of relationalconcepts is a natural consequence of structure-mappingtheory, but its psychological implications have not beenexplored. We report two experiments in which we examinehow encouraging subjects to represent relational conceptscompositionally versus unitarily affects learning onclassification- and inference-based category learning tasks.Our findings show that unitary representations lead to betterlearning than compositional representations, especially for theinference task. We conclude that unitary representations incurless cognitive load than structural alignment of compositionalrepresentations, and thus may be the default for everydayrelational reasoning.