Human brains construct individualized global rankings from identical few-shot local learning

Abstract Ranking—a ubiquitous relational structure—enables humans to organize complex information and overcome cognitive load, yet in real-world settings it is often inferred from sparse, few-shot learning of local pairwise relationships. How the human brain performs relational inference under such limited evidence remains unknown. We hypothesized that under few-shot learning, relational inference is shaped by inductive biases, such that individuals actively impose structured global relationships—often idiosyncratic—to constrain and unify limited local information. In a preregistered behavioral study combined with magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings, we show that even after identical few-shot local pair learning, individuals construct stable and self-consistent, yet idiosyncratic, global rankings that diverge from the ground-truth order—a phenomenon not readily explained by classical computational models of transitive inference. MEG recordings further reveal that frontoparietal neural representations are reorganized to reflect each individual’s subjective ranking rather than those of others. Together, these findings highlight the constructive and generative nature of human cognition: under sparse samples and limited computational resources, the human brain actively infers and imposes relational structure. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes Section on Introduction updated to incorporate few-shot learning framework and emphasize cognitive resource limitations; Figure 1 revised to include panel a illustrating the conceptual distinction between independent-value and constructive ranking accounts; results section reorganized to directly contrast independent-value and constructive ranking predictions; Figure 4 revised to Figure 4 MEG experimental design and behavioral results (MEG experiment) and Figure 5 neural correlates of subjective ranking after few-shot learning (MEG experiment); title and abstract revised to reflect theoretical framework; Supplemental files updated.