The Development of Relational Processing in Infancy

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

Analogical ability is the ability to make relational comparisons between objects, events, or ideas, and to see common relational patterns across them. It is a cornerstone of higher reasoning ability, and is essential for learning mathematics and science. This project investigates the nature of this ability and how it develops in infants, tracing its development over the first year of life. Delineating the conditions that promote relational learning in young infants, will lead to insights into how best to promote relational learning in children and in adults who show lags in abstract learning. One result of the proposed studies will be a set of methods and tools that can be used by teachers and caregivers to support relational learning. For example, this research can serve as a springboard for developing targeted interventions for young children diagnosed with language delay, as well as those diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders. Another result will be a better understanding of how to build artificial intelligence systems that learn more like people, with far less data than today's systems require. The starting point for this proposal is a recent demonstration that 7- and 9-month-old infants can form abstract same and different relations, and apply them to new objects. The preliminary studies suggest that even 3-month-old infants are capable of relational learning; however, they are highly vulnerable to distraction by the interestingness of the objects in the pairs. The new research will use four series of experiments to trace infants' ability to learn abstract relations. The first will examine the processes that promote relational learning in 3-month-olds. The second will investigate the conditions that support spontaneous comparison and learning in 7- and 9-month-olds. The third series will test how language influences relational learning- specifically, whether naming relations can improve learning, and whether naming objects can impede relational learning. The fourth series of experiments will investigate the generalizability of these effects by testing a variety of abstract relations. Computational modeling of the learning patterns found in our studies will provide complementary insights on these processes. Taken together, these studies will reveal information critical to understanding analogical processes and the origin and evolution of higher-order cognition.