Analogy-Making in Children: The Importance of Processing Constraints

The aim of the present study is to investigate children’s performance in an analogy-making task involving competing perceptual and relational matches in terms of developmental changes in executive functioning. We hypothesize that the selection of the common relational structure requires the inhibition of more salient perceptual features (such as identical shapes or colors). Most of the results show that children’s performance in analogy-making tasks would seem to depend crucially on the nature of the distractors. In addition, our results show that analogy-making performance depends on the nature of the dimensions involved in the relations (shape or color). Finally, in simple conditions, performance was adversely affected by the presence of irrelevant dimensions. These results are compatible with an analogy-making account (Richland et al., 2006) based on varying limitations in executive functioning at different ages.