A neural approach to relational reasoning

Consider the reader who pieces together the evidence in an Agatha Christie novel to predict the culprit of the crime, a child who runs ahead of her ball to prevent it rolling into a stream or even a shopper who compares the relative merits of buying kiwis or mangos at the market.We carve our world into relations between things. And we understand how the world works through our capacity to draw logical conclusions about how these different things - such as physical objects, sentences, or even abstract ideas - are related to one another. This ability is called relational reasoning and is central to human intelligence.We construct these relations from the cascade of unstructured sensory inputs we experience every day. For example, our eyes take in a barrage of photons, yet our brain organises this blooming, buzzing confusion into the particular entities that we need to relate.