The concept of relational complexity is applied to explain the persistent difficulties of young children with theory of mind. Relational complexity has been found useful as a general cognitive complexity metric. Children must understand that the relation between an object and a person's percept is conditional on a third variable, such as a filter…

Relational complexity has been found to be an effective metric for cognitive tasks. The hypothesis that the greater difficulty and later age of attainment of hierarchical classification as compared to category induction are attributable to differences in structural complexity was tested. Hierarchical classification entails a ternary relation…

Three experiments investigated effects of complexity on 2- to 6-year-olds' understanding of a beam balance. Found that 2- to 4-year-olds succeeded on problems that entailed binary relations, but 5- and 6-year-olds also succeeded on problems that entailed ternary relations. Ternary relations tasks from other domains (transitivity and class…

This study examined the hypothesis that age-related increases in reasoning ability are associated with the ability to represent relations of increasing complexity, defined as the number of entities related. The study's purpose was to determine the extent to which this ability to process relations with three entities increased between ages 4 and 8…