This article provides a synthesis and overview of a theory of cognitive development, rational
constructivism. The basic tenets of this view are as follows:(a) Initial state: Human infants …

Highlights• Relational reasoning underlies a myriad uniquely human abilities.• Multiple
cognitive and neural systems underlie abilities to perceive and reason about relations.• …

Highlights•Animal research on sameness shows a gradient of difficulty across tasks.•The
same gradient appears in human ontogeny.•Analogical comparison is critical to relational …

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 …

The present research examined cultural patterns of parental guidance for infants as they
learned about a new physical rule with hands-on experience. Nine-month-olds participated …

Although adults use metaphors to guide their thinking and reasoning, less is known about
whether metaphors might facilitate cognition earlier in development. Previous research …

Although deep neural networks can achieve human-level performance on many object
recognition benchmarks, prior work suggests that these same models fail to learn simple …

Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work,
we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a …

After considering the pervasiveness of same/different relationships in Psychology and the
experimental evidence of their perceptual foundation in Psychophysics and Infant and …

The notion of equality (identity) is simple and ubiquitous, making it a key case study for
broader questions about the representations supporting abstract relational reasoning …