How does culture influence how we learn to reason?

This week, one of our supervisors from the 2018/19 cohort, Alexandra Carstensen (Stanford University), published her latest research investigating cultural influences on abstract reasoning in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The experiments published involve nearly 400 children from the United States and China, aged 18 to 48 months old. The studies explored children’s relational reasoning abilities, specifically, early inferences about the abstract concepts “same” and “different”.

The results show that by age 3, Chinese and U.S. children have different relational biases and they follow distinct developmental trajectories of relational reasoning. These findings suggest that the early development of abstract thought is not universal, but instead varies with the learning context.

The work on this article inspired Alexandra to join the JRP as a supervisor last year, where she and her team are currently investigating which features of a child’s learning environment are relevant for differences in early abstract reasoning. Congratulations Alexandra – we are looking forward to the results of the JRP project!