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Updated: Jun 8, 2026
11:09
RBDT: A Computerized Task System based in Transposition for the Continuous Analysis of Relational Behavior Dynamics in Humans
Published on: July 17, 2021
Assessing the concreteness of relational representation.
Jonathan R Rein1, Arthur B Markman
1Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin, 1 University Station A8000, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
Summary
People struggle to generalize abstract relations, defaulting to concrete representations. Training with diverse concrete relations improves abstract understanding but doesn't eliminate reliance on specific learned forms.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Perception and Representation
Background:
- Prior research indicates concrete objects influence abstract relational knowledge transfer.
- The role of relation concreteness in this transfer remains less understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how the concreteness of relations, not just objects, impacts abstract relational knowledge transfer.
- To determine if increased exposure to diverse concrete relations enhances abstract representation.
Main Methods:
- Participants identified visual relational patterns after physical transformations.
- Experiments manipulated the concreteness of relations and the diversity of training examples.
- Performance was assessed based on the ability to generalize patterns to novel situations.
Main Results:
- Participants showed difficulty generalizing abstract relations to new concrete forms, even with unchanged objects.
- Initial representations default to concrete relations.
- Increasing the variety of concrete relations in training improved transfer for novel concrete relations but not for other transformations like object substitution.
Conclusions:
- Relational representations initially preserve concrete properties, including relation types.
- Abstract relational learning is not automatic; representations retain consistent environmental properties.
- Training diversity can promote more abstract representations but doesn't fully overcome concrete biases.
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