The roles of item repetition and position in infants’ abstract rule learning

•We examined how attention and memory constrain infants’ learning of abstract rules, an early form of analogical reasoning.•14-month-olds learned an abstract repetition rule regardless of position in sequence in 4-item sequences.•11-month-olds learned item positions in sequence, but not an abstract repetition rule.•Infant sequence learning may be constrained by item position in similar ways as in adults.•Results help clarify how infants discover, learn, and generalize abstract patterns, and how these abilities develop.