MARCS Insights Series: Relational reasoning in preschoolers

MARCS INSIGHTS SERIES – Tuesdays at 11am

All welcome! To receive the zoom link and be added to the mailing list, please email marcs@westernsydney.edu.au.

Speaker

Apoorva Shivaram

Interest Group

BabyLab

Abstract

Relational ability – the ability to compare situations or ideas and discover common relations – is a key process in higher-order cognition that underlies transfer in learning and creative problem solving. For this reason, it has generated intense interest both among developmentalists and in cross-species comparative studies. The gold standard for evaluating relational ability is the Relational-Match-to-Sample (RMTS) task (Premack, 1983). Current work in cognitive development has produced inconsistent results as to when children are able to pass the RMTS, with Christie and Gentner (2014) finding success at earlier ages than Hochmann et al. (2017) and Kroupin and Carey (2022). In this talk, I attempt to resolve this issue. I first describe two studies conducted in the US that bear out and extend the Christie and Gentner (2014) findings. I then discuss factors that might explain the discrepancy between the findings and preview the work that I plan to do while at MARCS.

Location

Level 4 Seminar Room, Innovation Quarter, 160 Hawkesbury Road, Sydney, NSW 2145, Australia

Join Remotely

To receive a link to virtually attend please register by emailing marcs@westernsydney.edu.au