A dissociative framework for understanding same-different conceptualization

Cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychologists have long been interested in humans’ and animals’ ability to respond to abstract relations. Cross-species research has used relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks in which participants try to find stimulus pairs that ‘match’ because they express the same abstract relation (same or different). Researchers seek to understand the cognitive processes that underlie successful matching, and the cognitive constraints that create species differences in these tasks. Here we describe a dissociative framework drawn from cognitive neuroscience. It has strong potential to illuminate the area of same-different conceptualization. It has already influenced comparative research on categorization and metacognition. This dissociative framework also shows that species differences in same-different conceptualization have resonance with species differences in other comparative domains.