Processing capacity defined by relational complexity: Implications for comparative, developmental, and cognitive psychology

Working memory limits are best defined in terms of the complexity of the re lations that can be processed in parallel. Complexity is defined as the num ber of related dimensions or sources of variation. A unary relation has one argument and one source of variation; its argument can be instantiated in only one way at a time. A binary relation has two arguments, two sources of variation, and two instantiations, and so on. Dimensionality is related to the number of chunks, because both attributes on dimensions and chunks are independent units of information of arbitrary size. Studies of working mem ory limits suggest that there is a soft limit corresponding to the parallel processing of one quaternary relation. More complex concepts are processed by "segmentation" or "conceptual chunking." In segmentation, tasks are bro ken into components that do not exceed processing capacity and can be proce ssed serially. In conceptual chunking, representations are "collapsed" to r educe their dimensionality and hence their processing load, but at the cost of making some relational information inaccessible. Neural net models of r elational representations show that relations with more arguments have a hi gher computational cost that coincides with experimental findings on higher processing loads in humans. Relational complexity is related to processing load in reasoning and sentence comprehension and can distinguish between t he capacities of higher species. The complexity of relations processed by c hildren increases with ape. Implications for neural net models and theories of cognition and cognitive development are discussed.