The practice of finding commonalities or fundamental connections across a…

Concept: When you examine many separate problems or situations and extract the single pattern, principle, or underlying connection that holds true across all of them — so that one insight can be reused on new but similar cases — that cognitive operation is called generalization; it moves from many specific instances toward one broadly applicable rule.

Application: The question describes exactly this — finding commonalities or fundamental connections across a range of particular circumstances — which is the standard definition of generalization, so Generalization is the correct term.

Cross-check: Comparing the term against the other options confirms the distinction:

• Abstraction simplifies a single case by keeping only its essential features and discarding irrelevant detail — it does not compare multiple circumstances to find what they share.

• Problem Solving is the overall activity of working toward a solution to a specific difficulty — it does not specifically mean discovering a shared pattern across many circumstances.

• Reasoning is the broad mental process of drawing logical conclusions from information; generalization is one narrower technique within reasoning, not a synonym for the whole process.