Context shapes early diversity in abstract thought

Abstract

Early abstract reasoning has typically been characterized by a "relational shift," in which children initially focus on object features but increasingly come to interpret similarity in terms of structured relations. An alternative possibility is that this shift reflects a learned bias, rather than a typical waypoint along a universal developmental trajectory. If so, consistent differences in the focus on objects or relations in a child's learning environment could create distinct patterns of relational reasoning, influencing the type of hypotheses that are privileged and applied. Specifically, children in the United States may be subject to culture-specific influences that bias their reasoning toward objects, to the detriment of relations. In experiment 1, we examine relational reasoning in a population with less object-centric experience-3-y-olds in China-and find no evidence of the failures observed in the United States at the same age. A second experiment with younger and older toddlers in China (18 to 30 mo and 30 to 36 mo) establishes distinct developmental trajectories of relational reasoning across the two cultures, showing a linear trajectory in China, in contrast to the U-shaped trajectory that has been previously reported in the United States. In a third experiment, Chinese 3-y-olds exhibit a bias toward relational solutions in an ambiguous context, while those in the United States prefer object-based solutions. Together, these findings establish population-level differences in relational bias that predict the developmental trajectory of relational reasoning, challenging the generality of an initial object focus and suggesting a critical role for experience.

Keywords: cognitive development; culture; learning; relational reasoning.

Fig. 1.

Schematic illustration of training for each condition (top two rows) and test trials (bottom row) in experiments 1 and 2.

Fig. 2.

Relational match (1) and nonmatch (0) options selected by 18- to 48-mo-olds in the United States and China in experiments 1 and 2, plotted with logistic regression fit lines. US toddler data (blue dots left of the indicator lines at 36 mo) are from Walker et al. (ref. , experiment 1). Shaded regions indicate 95% confidence intervals with Loess smoothing.

Fig. 3.

Schematic illustration of ambiguous training trial (top row) and test pairs (bottom row) in experiment 3, in which the evidence was consistent with both object and relational solutions.

Fig. 4.

Proportion of object and relational matches selected by children in the United States and China in experiment 3. Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals, and the dotted line represents chance performance. Match choice differed significantly between groups (*P < 0.01).