Relational language and inhibitory control in the development of analogical ability

This paper explores the role of relational language and inhibitory control in the development of children’s analogical reasoning ability. In two experiments, children were asked to make a relational mapping between two pictures while ignoring a competing object match. Experiment 1 demonstrated that children were more successful at this task when they heard relational language. The performance of children who heard relational language was equally good with and without a distracting object match present. Experiment 2 asks whether children with better inhibitory control are also better at ignoring object matches when mapping relations. Results suggest that the impact of inhibitory control may differ across ages. Future work will address how the factors of relational language and inhibition interact in the development of analogical ability. INTRODUCTION Exploring the origins and development of analogical ability is crucial to understanding human cognition. Although children have demonstrated the ability to make and use analogies, their analogical competence falls short of what adults are capable of. For instance adults are better able to form analogies between complex relational structures (take, for example, the analogy between the solar system and the atom; Gentner & Toupin, 1986). Another striking difference between adults’ and children’s performance on analogical tasks is children’s focus on objects and object properties over relations (Blades & Cooke, 1994; Gentner & Toupin, 1986; Gentner & Rattermann, 1991). The transition from reliance on objects to relations has been termed the relational shift (Gentner, 1988). What contributes to the development of children’s analogical abilities, especially to the shift in focus from objects to relations? Traditionally, proposals of analogical development have fallen under two broad categories: domain knowledge approaches and maturational constraints approaches. Domain knowledge approaches emphasize the importance of children’s conceptual repertoires in their ability to reason analogically. These theories suggest that children’s ability to reason analogically increases as they accrue knowledge about a particular domain and its relations (Gentner, 1988; Gentner & Rattermann, 1991; Goswami & Brown, 1989; Rattermann & Gentner, 1998; Vosniadou, 1989). Children are capable of noticing and utilizing relational similarity when they are familiar with the relations of interest, but not when they have limited knowledge of the relevant relations. In contrast, maturational constraints approaches view age-related cognitive capacity as the key component underlying the development of children’s analogical ability, emphasizing limitations in factors like children’s working memory capacity (Halford, 1993), inhibitory control (Richland, Morrison, & Holyoak, 2006), and cognitive flexibility (Jacques & Zelazo, 2005). In reality, both domain knowledge and maturational constraints must interact to influence analogical development. Richland, Morrison, and Holyoak (2006), using a mapping task adapted from Markman and Gentner (1993), Relational Language and Executive Control in the Development of Analogical Ability 415 investigated 3to 14-year-olds’ ability to reason analogically when knowledge of the relevant relations was held constant. They showed children pairs of pictures depicting familiar relations (e.g. chasing) and asked children to find a corresponding object in the second picture that went with an object in the first picture. If children are reasoning analogically, they should select the second object based on its role in the relational structure. Richland et al. varied the complexity of the relations and the presence of a distracting object match and found that although children at all age groups were familiar with the relations being tested (they succeeded on pairs without complex relations and with no object distractors), children’s performance on the complex items and items with object distractors continued to improve until 14 years. Richland et al. argued from these results that knowledge accretion alone is not enough to account for the development of analogical ability. They attributed the remaining gains in performance to maturational factors, such as increases in working memory capacity and inhibitory control. Specifically, they proposed that increased working memory allowed older children to reason about more complex relations and that greater inhibitory control allowed older children to ignore compelling object matches in favor of appropriate relational matches. Richland et al.’s (2006) proposal is consistent with data showing that the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), which is important for working memory and executive functions, including inhibition, is critical for relational reasoning (Krawczyk et al., 2008; Morrison et al., 2004; Viskontas, Morrison, Holyoak, Hummel, & Knowlton, 2004; Waltz, Lau, Grewal, & Holyoak, 2000). Developmentally, the PFC is 1 In Richland et al.’s studies, the distracting object was present in the second picture but was not part of the main relational structure. In contrast, objects in Markman and Gentner’s studies were always cross-mapped. That is, the object participated in the main relational structure of the second picture, but in a different role. late to mature (Diamond, 2002). However, the relationship between these fundamental cognitive capacities and the ability to reason analogically has not been directly assessed in children. Thus, one goal of this research is to directly investigate the role of one proposed factor, inhibition, on children’s ability to match relational structure while ignoring object matches. A second goal of the present paper is to examine the role that relational language plays in children’s analogical ability. Relational language is a representational tool that can help children focus on common relations and align two structures (Gentner & Rattermann, 1991). Loewenstein and Gentner (2005) found, for example, that aligning two three-tiered boxes in order to find a hidden object was difficult for young children. The task was even more challenging when distinct objects were placed at each location in the two boxes in such a way that corresponding objects were not in corresponding locations (the objects were crossmapped). However, when the locations of the boxes were described with spatial language (e.g. on, in, under or top, middle, bottom), children were able to successfully align the two boxes and find the hidden toy. As in Markman and Gentner’s and Richland et al.’s studies, the present studies asked children to view pairs of scenes with familiar relations and to select an object from a target picture that corresponded with a particular object from the base picture. In Experiment 1, we manipulated whether children heard relational language to describe the pictures. Given previous research suggesting that relational language enhances children’s analogical abilities, we expected that children who heard relational language would outperform children who heard neutral language. In Experiment 2, we asked whether children’s inhibitory control predicted performance on the same analogical mapping task used in Experiment 1. Inhibition