The paper proposes that basic social interactions can't be easily explained by complex relational models, suggesting simpler features are more effective.
Thomas proposes that infants use relational models to reason about interactions between relationship partners. However, many basic social interactions do not contain enough information to differentiate between models. We propose that both basic interaction reasoning and the formation of diverse, culturally relevant relationship categories are better accounted for by positing relationship features that can be flexibly combined.
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Powell et al. (2026) studied this question.
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