Adult humans show exceptional relational ability relative to other species. In this research, we trace the development of this ability in young children. We used a task widely used in comparative research--the relational match-to-sample task, which requires participants to notice and match the identity relation: for example, AA should match BB…

We investigated the understanding of causal systems categories--categories defined by common causal structure rather than by common domain content--among college students. We asked students who were either novices or experts in the physical sciences to sort descriptions of real-world phenomena that varied in their causal structure (e.g., negative…

Detecting that two images are different is faster for highly dissimilar images than for highly similar images. Paradoxically, we showed that the reverse occurs when people are asked to describe "how" two images differ--that is, to state a difference between two images. Following structure-mapping theory, we propose that this disassociation arises…

This research addresses the kinds of matching elements that determine analogical relatedness and literal similarity. Despite theoretical agreement on the importance of relational match, the empirical evidence is neither systematic nor definitive. In 3 studies, participants performed online evaluations of relatedness of sentence pairs that varied…