Topic: relational structure

Previous experiments have shown that a comparison of two written narratives highlights their shared relational structure, which in turn facilitates the retrieval of analogous narratives from the past (e.g., Gentner, Loewenstein, Thompson, & Forbus, 2009). However, analogical retrieval occurs across domains that appear more conceptually distant than merely different narratives, and the deepest analogies use matches in higher-order relational structure. The present study investigated whether comparison can facilitate analogical retrieval of higher-order relations across written narratives and ab

Building conceptual abstractions from sensory information and then reasoning about them is central to human intelligence. Abstract reasoning both relies on, and is facilitated by, our ability to make analogies about concepts from known domains to novel domains. Structure Mapping Theory of human analogical reasoning posits that analogical mappings rely on (higher-order) relations and not on the sensory content of the domain. This enables humans to reason systematically about novel domains, a problem with which machine learning (ML) models tend to struggle. We introduce a two-stage neural net fr

Humans’ ability to perceive and abstract relational structure is fundamental to our learning. It allows us to acquire knowledge all the way from linguistic grammar to spatial knowledge to social structures. How does a learner begin to perceive structure in the world? Why do we sometimes fail to see structural commonalities across events? To begin to answer these questions, I attempt to bridge two large, yet somewhat separate research traditions in understanding human’s structural abstraction: rule learning (Marcus et al., 1999) and analogical learning (Gentner, 1989). On the one hand, rule lea

Cognitive maps have been proposed as an essential relational structure for human memory and thought (Tolman, 1948; Constantinescu et al., 2016). In this format, remembered entities are embedded in space and their relationships are encoded via concrete angles and Euclidean distances. Although much of higher human cognition may be spatial, cognitive maps are not the only possible relational structure. With a behavioral experiment we aim to challenge the extent of the cognitive map hypothesis and to investigate when and how humans represent knowledge via the relational structure of cognitive grap