Its all shapes to me: Blocking aids discovery of complex relational structures

Relational rules organize simple associations into structured knowledge, enabling generalization to novel contexts—a cornerstone of reasoningin domains like mathematics. To investigate how such rules are learned, we used an analog of mathematical inequalities, where numerical values were represented by shapes, signs by color, and comparisons by spatial arrangement. The full inequality rule was decomposed into three cases:both values positive (green), both negative (red), or mixed. Across a series of 2×2 experiments, we manipulated training format (interleaved vs. blocked) and example exposure (present vs. absent) to assess their effects on rule acquisition. As predicted by previous studies, blocked training yielded better performance on the full task than interleaved training, such that blocking lends itself to the discovery of complex relational structures. These results suggest that the structure of training, rather than exposure to examples, plays a critical role in relational rule learning—raising important questions about how best to support generalization of relational rules in unfamiliar contexts

In Psychonomic Society