The Development of Analogical Reasoning in Children: A Computational Account

The Development of Analogical Reasoning in Children: A Computational Account Robert G. Morrison (robertmorrison@xunesis.org) Xunesis, PO Box 269187 Chicago, IL 60626-9187 USA Leonidas A. A. Doumas (adoumas@indiana.edu) Department of Psychology, Indiana University 1101 E. Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47405 USA Lindsey E. Richland (l.e.richland@uci.edu) Department of Education, University of California, Irvine 2001 Berkeley Place, Irvine, CA 92697-5500 USA Abstract Increased Domain Knowledge The relational primacy hypothesis as advanced by Goswami and colleagues argues that analogical reasoning is available as a capacity from early infancy, but that children’s analogical performance increases with age due to the accretion of knowledge about relevant relations (Goswami, 1992, 2001; Goswami & Brown, 1989). Piaget conducted early developmental research that indicated children were unable to reason analogically prior to achieving formal operations, approximately at age 13 or 14 (Piaget, Montangero & Billeter, 1977). Piaget’s tasks, however, frequently involved uncommon relations, such as “steering mechanism,” which would likely have been unfamiliar to younger children. When Goswami and Brown (1989) replaced such high content knowledge relations with simpler causal relations, they found children as young as 3 years old could be successful on some analogical reasoning tasks when they demonstrated the relevant knowledge about the particular task relations. In spite of their success, these children still performed lower than children at higher ages. So, as noted by the authors, the knowledge-based account cannot fully account for age-related effects in young children’s performance on analogical reasoning tasks. In particular, these authors pointed out that children seem to fail on analogies in systematic ways even when the children possess relational knowledge relevant to the task. We have previously reported results showing 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 (Richland, Morrison & Holyoak, 2004, in press). In this paper we present computer simulations in LISA (Hummel & Holyoak, 1997, 2003) demonstrating that both relational complexity and featural distraction effects can be parsimoniously accounted for by a simple change in inhibition in the model. This result is similar to data and simulations of analogy performance in patients with damage to prefrontal cortex (Morrison et al., 2004) and older adults (Viskontas et al., 2004), two other populations whose cognitive performance is associated with decreases in inhibitory control in working memory. These results lend support to the hypothesis that the development of inhibitory control in working memory is a critical factor in children’s ability to perform relational reasoning. Children’s development of analogical reasoning allows them to notice correspondences and make inferences about relationally similar phenomena across contexts. This greatly enriches children’s capacity for transfer of learning and schema abstraction, two essential aspects of children’s learning and cognitive development (Chen, Sanchez & Campbell, 1997; Gentner, 1977; Goswami, 2001; Halford, 1993; Holyoak, Junn & Billman, 1984). While many have argued that analogy is important for children’s cognitive development, there is considerable disagreement on the mechanisms of development of this important form of reasoning. Relational Shift Alternatively, Gentner and Rattermann (1991; Rattermann & Gentner, 1998) hypothesized that a domain-specific “relational shift” occurs. They suggest that as children build knowledge in a domain, they move from considering similarity based on perceptual features to considering similarity based on relations. Thus prior to the relational shift, children primarily attend to featural similarity between objects. Following the relational shift, children can and will reason on the basis of relational features,, making them successful on analogical reasoning tasks. Gentner and Rattermann have empirically demonstrated and replicated this effect. While these authors argue domain knowledge drives children’s transition through the relational shift, the Developmental Change in Analogy Historically, three primary hypotheses have been developed to explain age-related differences in analogical reasoning: changes in domain knowledge, a relational shift from object similarity to relational similarity, and increased working memory capacity for manipulating relations.