Achieving Abstraction: Early Competence & the Role of the Learning Context

Children's emerging ability to acquire and apply relational same-different concepts is often cited as a defining feature of human cognition, providing the foundation for abstract thought. Yet, young learners often struggle to ignore irrelevant surface features to attend to structural similarity instead. I will argue that young children have--and retain--genuine relational concepts from a young age, but tend to neglect abstract similarity due to a learned bias to attend to objects and their properties. Critically, this account predicts that differences in the structure of children's environmental input should lead to differences in the type of hypotheses they privilege and apply. I will review empirical support for this proposal that has (1) evaluated the robustness of early competence in relational reasoning, (2) identified cross-cultural differences in relational and object bias, and (3) provided evidence that contextual factors play a causal role in relational reasoning. Together, these studies suggest that the development of abstract thought may be more malleable and context-sensitive than initially believed.