Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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 developmentalist 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 earlier success than Hochmann et al. (2017) and Kroupin and Carey (2022). In this research, we attempt to resolve this issue. We first describe two studies that bear out and extend Christie and Gentner’s (2014) findings. We then discuss factors that might explain the discrepancy between the findings.