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.

认知、比较和发展心理学家长期以来一直对人类和动物对抽象关系作出反应的能力感兴趣。跨物种研究使用了样本关系匹配 (RMTS) 任务，参与者试图找到“匹配”的刺激对，因为它们表达了相同的抽象关系（相同或不同）。研究人员试图了解成功匹配的认知过程，以及在这些任务中造成物种差异的认知限制。在这里，我们描述了一个从认知神经科学中提取的分离框架。它具有阐明相同-不同概念化领域的强大潜力。它已经影响了分类和元认知的比较研究。