Producing and recognizing analogical relations.
Adults can derive brand-new analogies after brief RFT training, even when the task flips from selection to speaking.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four small lab experiments tested whether adults could learn analogies through RFT training.
Each adult first learned simple A-B and B-C relations like 'cat is to kitten as dog is to puppy.'
Then they faced new analogy problems they had never seen before.
The team checked if the adults could solve these new problems without extra teaching.
What they found
Most adults solved the first new analogy after only the basic training.
They kept solving brand-new analogies even when the format flipped from picking answers to speaking answers.
The adults also handled nonsymmetrical analogies like 'buyer is to seller' without extra help.
In short, the training made analogical thinking emerge on its own.
How this fits with other research
Matter et al. (2020) shows the same DRR logic works for kids learning foreign words.
They used tact training and got faster learning, just like Regina et al. got faster analogies.
Clements et al. (2021) and Curiel et al. (2020) used matrix training instead of RFT.
Both still produced lots of untrained correct answers, proving the emergent-learning idea travels across methods.
Bell (1999) did this first with a chimpanzee.
The ape formed functional classes through matching tasks, setting the stage for Regina et al. to test more complex human relations.
Why it matters
You can teach analogies without drilling every single pair.
Train a few core relations and let the learner's own derived relations do the rest.
Next time you teach categories, metaphors, or social comparisons, try an RFT-style mini-set and probe for emergent answers.
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Join Free →Pick one analogy set (e.g., hot-cold, big-small), train A-B and B-C relations, then probe three untrained analogies without extra teaching.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Analogical reasoning is an important component of intelligent behavior, and a key test of any approach to human language and cognition. Only a limited amount of empirical work has been conducted from a behavior analytic point of view, most of that within Relational Frame Theory (RFT), which views analogy as a matter of deriving relations among relations. The present series of four studies expands previous work by exploring the applicability of this model of analogy to topography-based rather than merely selection-based responses and by extending the work into additional relations, including nonsymmetrical ones. In each of the four studies participants pretrained in contextual control over nonarbitrary stimulus relations of sameness and opposition, or of sameness, smaller than, and larger than, learned arbitrary stimulus relations in the presence of these relational cues and derived analogies involving directly trained relations and derived relations of mutual and combinatorial entailment, measured using a variety of productive and selection-based measures. In Experiment 1 participants successfully recognized analogies among stimulus networks containing same and opposite relations; in Experiment 2 analogy was successfully used to extend derived relations to pairs of novel stimuli; in Experiment 3 the procedure used in Experiment 1 was extended to nonsymmetrical comparative relations; in Experiment 4 the procedure used in Experiment 2 was extended to nonsymmetrical comparative relations. Although not every participant showed the effects predicted, overall the procedures occasioned relational responses consistent with an RFT account that have not yet been demonstrated in a behavior-analytic laboratory setting, including productive responding on the basis of analogies.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2009 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2009.91-105