Development of Analogical Reasoning: A Novel Perspective From Cross‐Cultural Studies

Analogical reasoning allows children to generate new abstractions from experience, which drives early learning. But our current understanding of analogical learning is based primarily on evidence from the West, and new data from Asia seem to call into question that information. In this article, we describe our finding that East Asian children do not share their Western peers’ strong bias for object similarity—often cited as the major reason for difficulties in relational reasoning. We analyze how this difference affects the ways analogy shapes learning in different cultures, such as what children use as base analogs and their likelihood of using comparison that results in relational abstraction. We also address crosscultural differences, which are evident in classroom contexts, since teachers from the United States and East Asia use analogy differently. Overall, cross-cultural data are necessary to answer critical questions in theories of analogical learning; in this article, we chart pressing research questions and look ahead at directions for the field. KEYWORDS—analogy; cross-cultural development; learning; cognitive development Learning and development are about making sense of the new: acquiring new words and concepts, and discovering methods to solve novel problems. Analogical reasoning—the ability to perceive similarity of relations across events—is a powerful mechanism that facilitates learning. In reasoning analogically, learners map structures or relations from a familiar situation onto a novel one (Gentner, 1983). For example, if Jen knows that putting larger blocks atop small ones makes her block towers topple, she can put the smaller stool on top of the larger one when reaching for a high-placed cookie jar. The essence of analogical reasoning as a learning tool is that Jen makes a prediction about a novel situation given her knowledge of earlier setups, even if the earlier situation differs from the current task. The prominence of analogical reasoning in learning theories is paramount. It plays a fundamental role in language learning, problem solving, creativity, scientific discovery, and social cognition (Christie, 2017; see Gentner & Hoyos, 2017, for a review). Some have even suggested that higher-order relational reasoning is what separates the cognition of humans and nonhuman animals (Gentner, 2003, 2010; Penn, Holyoak, & Povinelli, 2008). Analogical reasoning also plays an important role in educational theories and testing (Spearman, 1927). In fact, one of the most widely used intelligence tests—Raven’s Progressive Matrices (Raven, 1941)—is essentially an analogical reasoning test. However, despite the centrality and claimed universality of analogy, almost everything we know about the development of analogical reasoning comes from studies conducted in the West (i.e., the United States, Europe, and Australia). The lack of evidence from other cultures is a critical gap in how we understand analogy and in how much confidence we place in our understanding of the concept. This gap would not be so concerning if preliminary data from other cultural milieus mirrored the results of studies done in the West; however, for the most part, this seems not to be the case. A well-known early example is a study of scene analogy tasks in which preschoolers from Hong Kong outperformed their U.S. peers when complex relations were involved (Richland, Chan, Morrison, & Au, 2010). Stella Christie, Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence and Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University; Yang Gao, Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University; Qiuchen Ma, Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University. This work is supported by Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program (grant number 20197010006). This research has no known conflict of interest to disclose. Stella Christie thanks Bartlomiej Czech for discussions on ideas in this article Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Stella Christie, Department of Psychology and Tsinghua Laboratory for Brain and Intelligence, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China. e-mail: christie@tsinghua.edu. cn. © 2020 Society for Research in Child Development DOI: 10.1111/cdep.12380 Volume 0, Number 0, 2020, Pages 1–7 CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES