Analogy-making in children: the importance of processing constraints
Category
Conference Proceedings
Authors
Thibaut, J.P., French, R.M., Vezneva, M.
Year
2008
Title
Analogy-making in children: the importance of processing constraints
Journal / book / conference
Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Abstract
The aim of the present study is to investigate children’s
performance in an analogy-making task involving competing
perceptual and relational matches in terms of developmental
changes in executive functioning. We hypothesize that the
selection of the common relational structure requires the
inhibition of more salient perceptual features (such as
identical shapes or colors). Most of the results show that
children’s performance in analogy-making tasks would seem
to depend crucially on the nature of the distractors. In
addition, our results show that analogy-making performance
depends on the nature of the dimensions involved in the
relations (shape or color). Finally, in simple conditions,
performance was adversely affected by the presence of
irrelevant dimensions. These results are compatible with an
analogy-making account (Richland et al., 2006) based on
varying limitations in executive functioning at different ages.
Pages
475-480
Keywords
analogical reasoning, development, children, inhibition, executive functions