Human cognitive abilities are remarkable, and even more remarkable is the rapidity
with which children develop cognitive insight.
How does this insight arise? A pervasive view in cognitive development is that
these rapid gains can only be explained by assuming that infants begin with substantial
amounts of innate knowledge. In this talk I propose an alternative approach, centered
on mechanisms of human learning. I suggest two powerful forces that contribute to human
learning and reasoning ability: (1) analogical processing; and (2) the acquisition of
relational language. I will present evidence that the structure-mapping processes that
occur during analogy and similarity are a core mechanism by which abstract knowledge
arises from experience. Our studies of learning in adults and children show that
analogical comparison processes foster learning in several ways: by aligning common
relational structure, by suggesting inferences between situations, by focusing attention
on relevant differences, and by inviting relational abstractions.
A further contributor to human learning and reasoning is the acquisition of relational
language. Relational language provides labels that preserve and systematize the relations
discovered through comparison processes. It also acts to invite analogical comparisons
that reveal common structure. In sum, I suggest that mutual bootstrapping between
structure-mapping processes and relational language is a major contributor to human cognition.