Analogical reasoning is at the core of human cognition, but is it universal? Do people from different cultures reason analogically in the same way? Despite the prevalence of analogical research, to date, there is almost no cross-cultural work investigating analogical reasoning in adults from non-WEIRD cultures. Here we fill this important gap by revisiting a long-standing cross-cultural difference—the holistic-analytic difference among Easterners and Westerners (Nisbett, 2001)—to ask whether this difference is also evident in analogical reasoning. Decades of cross-cultural research showed that Easterners are more attentive to contextual relations than Westerners, giving way to an untested presumption that Easterners are more relational, more analogical than Westerners. We tested this assumption using the classic holistic-analytic task and scene analogy mapping task with US and Chinese participants. While we replicated the holistic-analytic (East-West) difference, US and Chinese participants did not differ in the analogy task.

Humans are remarkably adept at abstract rule learning, but little is known about when learners apply this knowledge. We investigated a fundamental constraint in rule generalization: attention to featural similarity (object bias). Across two experiments in different domains, we asked whether adults’ abstract rule generalization is constrained by superficial matches to the concrete exemplars present during learning, as is known to be the case for analogical reasoning (Gentner & Toupin, 1986). In the present studies, participants were exposed to a series of sequences following a simple rule and were asked to generalize to novel instances of either the same rule or a new rule. In one condition, an individual element present during initial learning was inserted into the new, unfamiliar pattern. Results showed that adults often chose this object match over the rule match, suggesting that abstract rule generalization, like analogical reasoning, is impacted by concrete features of the input.

Exploration and exploitation decision-making are crucial cognitive processes, often guided by an individual's knowledge state. The information gap theory posits that lesser knowledge enhances exploration, yet the differential impacts of factual versus perceived knowledge on exploration preferences are not thoroughly understood. This research aims to bridge this gap by independently manipulating factual and perceived knowledge to assess their separate effects on exploration behaviors. Through three studies, we discovered that individuals with less factual knowledge explored more intensely and for longer durations, but only when they were explicitly aware of their information gaps. Furthermore, our findings reveal that the perception of insufficient knowledge can trigger increased exploration, independent of the factual knowledge possessed. Our studies illuminate the significant impact of metacognitive states on exploration preferences, advancing our understanding of how people decide whether to explore or exploit.

How and why are analogies spontaneously generated? Despite the prominence of analogy in learning and reasoning, there is little research on whether and how analogy is spontaneously generated in everyday settings. Here we fill this gap by gathering parents' answers to children's real questions, and examining analogy use in parental explanations. Study 1 found that parents used analogy spontaneously in their explanations, despite no prompt nor mention of analogy in the instruction. Study 2 found that these analogical explanations were rated highly by parents, schoolteachers, and university students alike. In Study 3, six-year-olds also rated good analogical explanations highly, but unlike their parents, did not rate them higher than causal, non-analogical explanations. We discuss what makes an analogy a good explanation, and how theories from both explanation and analogy research explain one’s motivation for spontaneously generating analogies.

This research tested and confirmed a novel hypothesis that similarity sets the ground for diversities to emerge, which then give rise to creativity. Adopting an experimental design, we recruited 66 typically-developing Chinese children (M = 6.04 years, SD = .28). First, in a Comparison task, these children were randomly assigned to name differences between two objects that were either highly similar (high-similarity condition) or dissimilar (low-similarity condition). Next, all children completed a divergent thinking task and received scores on fluency, originality, and usefulness. Results of t-tests showed that children of high-similarity condition reported both more surface (pertaining to perceptual features) and deep (pertaining to structural features) alignable differences and have on average a higher originality score, compared to children of low-similarity condition. Mediation analysis results further showed that the number of deep alignable differences mediated the effect of condition on children's originality scores. This confirmed our expectation that the high similarity between objects facilitated children to generate more deep alignable differences, which subsequently facilitated children to generate more original ideas.

What makes humans smart? We think it has to do with our analogical ability—our ability to perceive common relational patterns between different objects, events, or ideas. It is a cornerstone of our higher-order reasoning ability and may have its origins in a relational processing mechanism that allows us to abstract relations using comparison. In this symposium, we present research on the nature of our relational learning ability. We show that findings from infants, preschoolers, elementary school students, and adults reveal common signatures across a wide variety of contexts. These studies provide evidence about how to improve learning of abstract relational concepts and provide insight about how to build better AI models.