Generalizing relations during analogical problem solving in preschool children : does blocked or interleaved training improve performance ?
Category
Conference Proceedings
Authors
Thibaut, J.P., Goldwater, M.B.
Year
2017
Title
Generalizing relations during analogical problem solving in preschool children : does blocked or interleaved training improve performance ?
Journal / book / conference
Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Abstract
Analogical reasoning, the mapping of structured relations across conceptual domains, is commonly recognized as essential to human cognition, but young children often perform poorly in the classical A:B::C:? analogical reasoning task. Particularly, young children have trouble when the objects in the task are not strongly associated with each other, and/or when there are strong associative lures among the potential answers. Here, we examine whether successive trials that repeat the same relation needed to solve the analogy can help overcome some of the challenges with weakly associated items. In the first of two experiments, our results were mixed. In the second, we simplified the design, and were able to more clearly show a benefit of repeating relations across consecutively solved problems.
Pages
3308-3313
Keywords
Analogical reasoning, development, learning, generalization