Beyond Newton: Why assumptions of universality are critical to cognitive science, and how to finally move past them.

Cognitive science is a study of human universals. This assumption, which we will refer to as the Newtonian principle (NP), explicitly or implicitly pervades the theory, methods, and prose of most cognitive research. This is despite at least half a century of sustained critique by cross-cultural and anthropologically oriented researchers and glaring counterexamples such as the study of literacy. We argue that a key reason for this intransigence is that the NP solves the boundary problem of cognitive science. Since studying the idiosyncratic cognitive features of an individual is not a generalizable scientific enterprise, what scale of generalization in cognitive science is legitimate and interesting? The NP solution is a priori-only findings generalizing to all humans are legitimate. This approach is clearly flawed; however, critiques of the NP fail to provide any alternative solution. In fact, some anti-NP branches of research have abandoned generalizability altogether. Sailing between the scylla and charybdis of NP and hermeneutics, we propose an explicit, alternative solution to the boundary problem. Namely, building on many previous efforts, we combine cultural-evolutionary theory with a newly defined principle of articulation. This framework requires work on any given cognitive feature to explicitly hypothesize the universal or group-specific environments in which it emerges. Doing so shifts the question of legitimate generalizability from flawed, a priori assumptions to being a target of explicit claims and theorizing. Moreover, the articulation framework allows us to integrate existing findings across research traditions and motivates a range of future directions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The importance of inference in relational reasoning: Relational matching as a case study.

Nonhuman animals and preschoolers struggle with Relational-Match-to-Sample (RMTS), a classic test of the capacity for second-order relational, analogical, and reasoning. These failures are often explained by limitations in representational or computational capacities. Drawing on recent evidence for robust spontaneous RMTS success (i.e., without error-feedback) in crows and parrots after minimal second-order training, we present five experiments with human adults consistent with the possibility that population differences sometimes instead derive from differences in inductive biases alone. Experiment 1 confirms human adults have the capacities and requisite representations to succeed spontaneously on RMTS. Experiments 2-5 utilize a modified RMTS task in which adults make relational matches only about half of the time. Experiment 3 tests whether eight trials of various MTS tasks, nonsecond-order training featured in the aforementioned comparative studies, can increase spontaneous second-order relational responding in human adults. Two of the MTS tasks (Number, Size MTS) do so, demonstrating that MTS training can, in fact, increase relational responding by changing inductive biases alone. The other MTS tasks (Identity, Color MTS) do not do so, evidence that the facilitating effect is not a result of matching involved in MTS per se. Experiments 4 and 5 test one hypothesized mechanism by which specifically Number/Size MTS tasks may have led to increased relational responding, that is, by inhibiting preexisting biases to match on shape and/or color, making relational matches relatively more likely. We close by discussing the importance of research into inductive biases to the project of understanding relational reasoning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

You cannot find what you are not looking for: Population differences in relational reasoning are sometimes differences in inductive biases alone.

Relational reasoning is a cornerstone of human cognition. Extensive work, drawing on the Relational Match to Sample paradigm (RMTS), has established that humans, at least above the age of five, are much more proficient relational reasoners than younger children or non-human animals. While sometimes differences between populations derive from differences in capacity (the capacity to create representations in a certain format or of a certain complexity, information processing capacity), other times such differences derive from different learning histories alone. Here we distinguish between two types of learning history explanations on the example of four-year-olds' failure on Premack's (1983) RMTS task: (1) that children four-year-olds have not yet created representations of the relations same and different with the properties need to support success on RMTS and (2) that four-year-olds have different inductive biases than do adults. Experiment 1 established that four-year-olds are at chance on the RMTS task we deploy as a transfer task in Experiment 2. Experiments 2A-C each provide children with a mere 8 trials of training on of one three MTS tasks (Number, Size and Identity MTS, respectively), none of which involves making matches of same to same or different to different. The very brief training (eight trials) on two of these tasks (Number MTS, Size MTS) leads to spontaneous success on RMTS in four-year-olds. Identity MTS has no effect on subsequent performance on RMTS. Given the brevity and non-relational nature of the training the successes after Number and Size MTS training must have resulted from changing inductive biases alone. Furthermore, the same two training tasks increased relational responding by adults on a related task (Kroupin & Carey, in press), whereas Identity MTS training did not, suggesting that the mechanisms through which the training changed inductive biases are at least partially continuous between ages four and adulthood.