Title: Cross-cultural differences in analogical reasoning - eScholarship
Abstract: Cross-cultural Differences in Analogical Reasoning Megumi Kuwabara ([email protected]) Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University 1101 E. Tenth Street Bloomington, IN 47405 USA Linda B. Smith ([email protected]) Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University 1101 E. Tenth Street Bloomington, IN 47405 USA Abstract experimenter’s set) might be comprised of a small car, medium cup, and big house. The other set (the participant’s set) might include a small cup (that is the same as the medium cup in the other set), a medium house (that is the same one as the big house in the other set), and a big floor pot. One object in the experimenter set (say the middle sized cup) was indicated as the winner and children were asked to indicate the winner in their set. They could choose the middle-sized object in their set (same relation but different object) or they could choose the cup (same object but in a different relation to other objects). Three and four year old children consistently choose the matching objects; adults choose the object in same relational role in the set. In brief, younger children appear to attend to objects and adults more to relations. A subsequent study (Rattermann and Gentner, 1998) showed that making the objects simpler increased relational responding by children. The experimenter constructed sets in which all objects were cups, only varying size, or in which, as described above, they were richly detailed and varied in kind. Children made many more object responses and few relational responses with the rich than with the simpler stimuli. Apparently, the rich stimuli pushed children to attend to the objects – as individuals – rather than to their role in the larger scene. In general, the results in this robust literature show that older children and adults are much better able to ignore objects and discern the relations even in complex scenes than the younger children. The key developmental changes occur around 4 years of age and are sometimes referred to as the “relational shift” (e.g. Gentner, 1988; Rattermann & Gentner, Much research in developmental psychology and cognitive development presumes a universal developmental trend that is independent of culture. One such trend, from object to relational knowledge, is seen over and over. However, most of this research is based on the study of children and individuals from Western cultures. This paper considers the possibility that this developmental trend might differ in different cultures. Introduction A relation is a structured connection between entities that is about the role of those components in the event. The participating components are relevant to this relational structure, not because of their own individual properties but rather because of their relation to the other entities. Thus for the relation “A is bigger than B”, the size of A matters, but not its particular size, only its size in comparison to that of B. Relations and relational reasoning are arguably the core of higher human thought. Research has shown relational structures to be important to human perception and reasoning (Hummel & Biederman, 1992; Doumas, Hummel, & Sandhofer, 2008), mathematics (e.g. Mix, 2008), analogy (e.g. Gentner, 1983), science (Gentner, 1982a), and language (e.g. Gentner, 1982; Gentner & Namy, Objects are the problem Considerable research has focused on the development of relational reasoning. The key developmental problem appears to be one of going beyond the properties of the individual objects. That is, young children often fail in relational reasoning tasks because they attend to the objects as individuals, not the relations among the objects (Gentner, 1988, Gentner & Namy, 1999; Gentner & Rattermann, 1991; Gentner & Toupin, 1986, Kotovsky & Gentner, 1996). In one study, Rattermann, Gentner, and DeLoach (1990) presented three and four year old children and adults with sets of three objects with the objects in the set ordered by increasing size. For example, one set (the Cultural differences? The priority of objects over relations is likely to be universal aspect of human cognition. Gentner (1982b) proposed two related hypotheses with respect to this idea. First, she proposed that objects were perceptually and cognitively prior than relations because they derive from universal
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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