Relational thinking and relational reasoning: harnessing the power of patterning

Relational reasoning developement 1 Development of relational reasoning during adolescence

Non-linear changes in behaviour and in brain activity during adolescent development have been reported in a variety of cognitive tasks. These developmental changes are often interpreted as being a consequence of changes in brain structure, including non-linear changes in grey matter volumes, which occur during adolescence. However, very few studies have attempted to combine behavioural, functio...

Recurrent Relational Networks for Complex Relational Reasoning

Humans possess an ability to abstractly reason about objects and their interactions, an ability not shared with state-of-the-art deep learning models. Relational networks, introduced by Santoro et al. (2017), add the capacity for relational reasoning to deep neural networks, but are limited in the complexity of the reasoning tasks they can address. We introduce recurrent relational networks whi...

Analogy and Relational Reasoning

Analogy is an inductive mechanism based on structured comparisons of mental representations. It is an important special case of role-based relational reasoning, in which inferences are generated on the basis of patterns of relational roles. Analogical reasoning is a complex process involving retrieval of structured knowledge from long-term memory, representing and manipulating role-filler bindi...

Both/and: The Alternative of Relational Thinking

To call the issues facing departments of English today difficult or sensitive would obviously be understating the case. Chairs would be forgiven if they had nightmares about the incommensurability of the demands made on them and the kind of institutional and collegial support they can count on. Some of the problems they face are internal ones, such as how to deal with the ideological factions—o...

Relational Reasoning about Contexts