Why do children struggle on analogical reasoning tasks? Considering the role of problem format by measuring visual attention

Given the importance of analogical reasoning to bootstrapping children's understanding of the world, why is this ability so challenging for children? Two common sources of error have been implicated: 1) children's inability to prioritize relational information during initial problem solving; 2) children's inability to disengage from salient distractors. Here, we use eye tracking to examine children and adults' looking patterns when solving scene analogies, finding that children and adults attended differently to distractors, and that this attention predicted performance. These results provide the most direct evidence to date that feature based distraction is an important way children and adults differ during early analogical reasoning. In contrast to recent work using propositional analogies, we find no differences in children and adults' prioritization of relational information during problem solving, and while there are some differences in general attentional strategies across age groups, neither prioritization of relational information nor attentional strategy predict successful problem solving. Together, our results suggest that analogy problem format should be taken into account when considering developmental factors in children's analogical reasoning.

Personal narrative as a 'breeding ground' for higher-order thinking talk in early parent-child interactions

Personal narrative is decontextualized talk where individuals recount stories of personal experiences about past or future events. As an everyday discursive speech type, narrative potentially invites parents and children to explicitly link together, generalize from, and make inferences about representations-i.e., to engage in higher-order thinking talk (HOTT). Here we ask whether narratives in early parent-child interactions include proportionally more HOTT than other forms of everyday home language. Sixty-four children (31 girls; 36 White, 14 Black, 8 Hispanic, 6 mixed/other race) and their primary caregiver(s) (M _income = $61,000) were recorded in 90-minute spontaneous home interactions every 4 months from 14-58 months. Speech was transcribed and coded for narrative and HOTT. We found that parents at all visits and children after 38 months used more HOTT in narrative than non-narrative, and more HOTT than expected by chance. At 38- and 50-months, we examined HOTT in a related but distinct form of decontextualized talk-pretend, or talk during imaginary episodes of interaction-as a control to test whether other forms of decontextualized talk also relate to HOTT. While pretend contained more HOTT than other (non-narrative/non-pretend) talk, it generally contained less HOTT than narrative. Additionally, unlike HOTT during narrative, the amount of HOTT during pretend did not exceed the amount expected by chance, suggesting narrative serves as a particularly rich 'breeding ground' for HOTT in parent-child interactions. These findings provide insight into the nature of narrative discourse, and suggest narrative potentially may be used as a lever to increase children's higher-order thinking.

A cultural lens on Yucatec Maya families' COVID-19 experiences

Health guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic led families around the world to spend more time isolated together, disrupting leisure activities, schooling, social interactions, and family work (UNICEF, 2021). Using the lens of Yucatec Maya families' cultural values and practices, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 Yucatec Maya rural women in Mexico (Mage  = 32; and for comparison, 13 middle-class European-American women (Mage  = 41)), with children 6-7 years old, to analyze families' experiences during the pandemic. Faced with the same isolation as in the United States, our exploratory analysis revealed Maya families experienced external stresses but at the same time were generally comfortable with their children's everyday activities and their social-emotional well-being, illuminating consequences of the communities' cultural theories about development.

The origins of higher-order thinking lie in children's spontaneous talk across the pre-school years

Higher-order thinking is relational reasoning in which multiple representations are linked together, through inferences, comparisons, abstractions, and hierarchies. We examine the development of higher-order thinking in 64 preschool-aged children, observed from 14 to 58 months in naturalistic situations at home. We used children's spontaneous talk about and with relations (i.e., higher-order thinking talk, or HOTT) as a window onto their higher-order thinking skills. We find that surface HOTT, in which relations between representations are more immediate and easily perceptible, appears before-and is far more frequent than-structure HOTT, in which relations between representations are more abstract and less easy to perceive. Child-specific factors (including early vocabulary and gesture use, first-born status, and family income) predict differences in children's onset (i.e., age of acquisition) of HOTT and its trajectory of use across development. Although HOTT utterances tend to be longer and more syntactically complex than non-HOTT utterances, HOTT frequently appears in non-complex utterances, and a substantial proportion of children achieve complex utterance onset prior to the onset of HOTT. This finding suggests that complex language is neither necessary nor sufficient for HOTT to occur; other factors above and beyond complex linguistic skills are involved in the onset and use of higher-order thinking. Finally, we found that the trajectory of HOTT, particularly structure HOTT-but not complex utterances-during the preschool period predicts standardized outcome measures of inference and analogy skills in grade school, which underscores the crucial role that this kind of early talk plays for later outcomes.

Individual Differences in Relational Learning and Analogical Reasoning: A Computational Model of Longitudinal Change

Children's cognitive control and knowledge at school entry predict growth rates in analogical reasoning skill over time; however, the mechanisms by which these factors interact and impact learning are unclear. We propose that inhibitory control (IC) is critical for developing both the relational representations necessary to reason and the ability to use these representations in complex problem solving. We evaluate this hypothesis using computational simulations in a model of analogical thinking, Discovery of Relations by Analogy/Learning and Inference with Schemas and Analogy (DORA/LISA; Doumas et al., 2008). Longitudinal data from children who solved geometric analogy problems repeatedly over 6 months show three distinct learning trajectories though all gained somewhat: analogical reasoners throughout, non-analogical reasoners throughout, and transitional - those who start non-analogical and grew to be analogical. Varying the base level of top-down lateral inhibition in DORA affected the model's ability to learn relational representations, which, in conjunction with inhibition levels used in LISA during reasoning, simulated accuracy rates and error types seen in the three different learning trajectories. These simulations suggest that IC may not only impact reasoning ability but may also shape the ability to acquire relational knowledge given reasoning opportunities.

Working memory predicts children's analogical reasoning

Analogical reasoning is the cognitive skill of drawing relationships between representations, often between prior knowledge and new representations, that allows for bootstrapping cognitive and language development. Analogical reasoning proficiency develops substantially during childhood, although the mechanisms underlying this development have been debated, with developing cognitive resources as one proposed mechanism. We explored the role of executive function (EF) in supporting children's analogical reasoning development, with the goal of determining whether predicted aspects of EF were related to analogical development at the level of individual differences. We assessed 5- to 11-year-old children's working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility using measures from the National Institutes of Health Toolbox Cognition battery. Individual differences in children's working memory best predicted performance on an analogical mapping task, even when controlling for age, suggesting a fundamental interrelationship between analogical reasoning and working memory development. These findings underscore the need to consider cognitive capacities in comprehensive theories of children's reasoning development.

Early Executive Function Predicts Reasoning Development

Analogical reasoning is a core cognitive skill that distinguishes humans from all other species and contributes to general fluid intelligence, creativity, and adaptive learning capacities. Yet its origins are not well understood. In the study reported here, we analyzed large-scale longitudinal data from the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development to test predictors of growth in analogical-reasoning skill from third grade to adolescence. Our results suggest an integrative resolution to the theoretical debate regarding contributory factors arising from smaller-scale, cross-sectional experiments on analogy development. Children with greater executive-function skills (both composite and inhibitory control) and vocabulary knowledge in early elementary school displayed higher scores on a verbal analogies task at age 15 years, even after adjusting for key covariates. We posit that knowledge is a prerequisite to analogy performance, but strong executive-functioning resources during early childhood are related to long-term gains in fundamental reasoning skills.

A computational account of children's analogical reasoning: balancing inhibitory control in working memory and relational representation

Theories accounting for the development of analogical reasoning tend to emphasize either the centrality of relational knowledge accretion or changes in information processing capability. Simulations in LISA (Hummel & Holyoak, 1997, 2003), a neurally inspired computer model of analogical reasoning, allow us to explore how these factors may collaboratively contribute to the development of analogy in young children. Simulations explain systematic variations in United States and Hong Kong children's performance on analogies between familiar scenes (Richland, Morrison & Holyoak, 2006; Richland, Chang, Morrison & Au, 2010). Specifically, changes in inhibition levels in the model's working-memory system explain the developmental progression in US children's ability to handle increases in relational complexity and distraction from object similarity during analogical reasoning. In contrast, changes in how relations are represented in the model best capture cross-cultural differences in performance between children of the same ages (3-4 years) in the United States and Hong Kong. We use these results and simulations to argue that the development of analogical reasoning in children may best be conceptualized as an equilibrium between knowledge accretion and the maturation of information processing capability.

Children’s development of analogical reasoning: Insights from scene analogy problems

We explored how relational complexity and featural distraction, as varied in scene analogy problems, affect children's analogical reasoning performance. Results with 3- and 4-year-olds, 6- and 7-year-olds, 9- to 11-year-olds, and 13- and 14-year-olds indicate that when children can identify the critical structural relations in a scene analogy problem, development of their ability to reason analogically interacts with both relational complexity and featural distraction. Error patterns suggest that children are more likely to select a distracting object than to make a relational error for problems that present both possibilities. This tendency decreases with age, and older children make fewer errors overall. The results suggest that changes in analogical reasoning with age depend on the interplay among increases in relational knowledge, the capacity to integrate multiple relations, and inhibitory control over featural distraction.