Concreteness and Relational Matching in Preschoolers

Concreteness and Relational Matching in Preschoolers Jennifer A. Kaminski (kaminski.16@osu.edu) Center for Cognitive Science, Ohio State University 208A Ohio Stadium East, 1961 Tuttle Park Place, Columbus, OH 43210, USA Vladimir M. Sloutsky (sloutsky.1@osu.edu) Center for Cognitive Science, Ohio State University 208D Ohio Stadium East, 1961 Tuttle Park Place, Columbus, OH 43210, USA Abstract This study investigated the effect of concreteness on preschool children’s ability to recognize simple relations. Participants, age 3.0 to 5.0 years, were asked to make one-shot relational matches from a base to a target display. Two types of questions were posed: Generic in which the base display contained simple geometric shapes and Concrete in which the base display contained colorful familiar objects. Two between-subjects conditions varied the order in which the Concrete and Generic questions were asked. The results reveal relational matching on Concrete questions was significantly higher when preceded by Generic questions than when answered first, suggesting children transferred relational knowledge acquired through the Generic questions to answer the Concrete questions. However, there was no improvement on Generic questions when preceded by Concrete questions. These are novel findings suggesting that young children can better acquire and subsequently transfer relational knowledge from a generic format than from a concrete, perceptually rich format. Keywords: Cognitive Science; Relations, Structure Recognition. Psychology; Transfer; Introduction The ability to recognize common relations across different situations is not always easy, but tends to improve through the course of development. Most researchers agree that some form of a relational shift occurs in development (e.g. Gentner, 1988; Gentner & Ratterman, 1991, see also Goswami, 1991); young children are more likely to attend to object-level similarities between systems or displays and overlook relations. Later in development, people become more likely to attend to relational similarities. For example, when given a simple metaphor such as a plant stem is like a straw, children’s interpretation is often based on superficial attributes, such as both are thin and straight. Adults tend to interpret such metaphors through deeper relations; in this case, both can carry water (Gentner, 1988). One category of theoretical accounts of relational development is that the relational shift is knowledge-driven (Brown, 1989, Brown & Kane, 1988; Gentner, 1988, Gentner & Ratterman, 1991, Vosniadou, 1989). By such accounts, domain-specific knowledge is the primary predictor of ability to attend to relations. In support of this position, there is considerable evidence that while young children may fail to reason analogically (i.e. based on relational structure) in many instances, they can reason analogically in contexts that are familiar to them (see Gentner, Ratterman, Markman, & Kotovsky, 1995 for discussion). For example, Gentner (1977a, 1977b) found that when 4-year-old children were shown a picture of a tree and asked, “If a tree had a knee, where would it be? ”, they interpreted the relational correspondence and responded as accurately as adults. Similarly, preschool children, aged 3 to 5 years, successfully transferred problem-solving strategies from contexts involving simple, familiar relations such as mimicry and camouflage (Brown & Kane, 1988). Additionally, 4-year-olds applied relational reasoning on tasks involving known relations, such as cutting and melting (Goswami & Brown, 1989). Taken together, there is ample evidence of successful relational reasoning by young children when the relations are known to them. Yet, even in the context of simple relations and familiar objects, attention to relations can be diverted by interference of surface similarities across the base and target domains. For example, preschool children, age 3 and 4 years, were tested on their ability to make relational matches involving the relation of monotonic increase or decrease of three items (Gentner & Rattermann, 1991; see Gentner, et al., 1995 for summary). In the task, the experimenter and the participant each had sets of three items arranged in monotonically increasing or decreasing order. The child was asked to close his/ her eyes while the experimenter hid stickers under one object in each set. The stickers were always placed under items in the same relational roles across sets. When the child opened his/her eyes, the experimenter showed the child an object with sticker in the experimenter’s set and asked the child to find the sticker was in the child’s set. This study had a 2 x 2 design: literal similarity or cross-mapping by stimuli type. In the literal similarity condition, the correct item matched the target on both object appearance and relational location. In the cross-mapping condition, the correct item differed in appearance and matched the target only on relational location. Also, in the cross-mapped condition, an incorrect relational choice matched the target object in appearance. Hence, children could make either relational matches or appearance matches. The stimuli type varied the perceptual richness of the objects: either sparse,