Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Relational Match to Sample (RMTS) is a common test of relational reasoning involving matching cards based onthe relations “same” and “different”. Children below the age of five fail RMTS, even with corrective feedback. Given thatsuccess on RMTS depends on the ability to represent and compare ”same” and ”different”, such failure has been interpreted asindicative of the absence of these abilities (Penn, Holyoak & Povinelli, 2008; Hochmann, Mody & Carey, 2016).In the current studies three, four and five-year-old children were provided explicit instructions on RMTS. Results showsuccess in all groups, including three-year-olds - two years earlier than previous work. This suggests the ability to representand compare ”same” and ”different” emerges significantly earlier than spontaneous success on RMTS, undermining previousinterpretations. More generally, this work begins to explore the nature of the development which allows existing relationalreasoning capacities to be spontaneously deployed in RMTS.