According to a new study published in the journal Child Development, infants are capable of understanding abstract relations like ‘same’ and ‘different.’

“This suggests that a skill key to human intelligence is present very early in human development, and that language skills are not necessary for learning abstract relations,” said Dr Alissa Ferry of the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Italy, lead author of the study.

To trace the origins of relational thinking in infants, Dr Ferry and her colleagues from Northwestern University tested whether 7-month-old infants could understand the simplest and most basic abstract relation – the same-different relation.

Infants were shown pairs of items that were either the same (two Elmo dolls) or different (Elmo doll and a toy camel) until their looking time declined.

In the test phase, the infants looked longer at pairs showing the novel relation, even when the test pairs were composed of new objects. That is, infants who had learned the same relation looked longer at test pairs showing the different relation during test, and vice versa.

This suggests that the infants had encoded the abstract relation and detected when the relation changed.

“We found that infants are capable of learning these relations. Additionally, infants exhibit the same patterns of learning as older children and adults – relational learning benefits from seeing multiple examples of the relation and is impeded when attention is drawn to the individual objects composing the relation,” Dr Ferry said.

“The infants in our study were able to form an abstract same or different relation after seeing only 6-9 examples,” said co-author Prof Dedre Gentner of Northwestern University.

“It appears that relational learning is something that humans, even very young humans, are much better at than other primates.”

_____

Alissa L. Ferry et al. Prelinguistic Relational Concepts: Investigating Analogical Processing in Infants. Child Development, published online May 20, 2015; doi: 10.1111/cdev.12381