Cognitive Science & Psychology Division, ULAB

Analogical transfer, or the ability to use similar solutions to solve seemingly dissimilar problems, has been studied in children using tasks that require the support of long-term memory. However, the transfer of solutions that require the use of tools, or objects with certain functional parts, has not been studied in great depth. This paper replicates and extends upon data collected from a novel study that investigated the role of age and memory on analogical transfer across children who attend public preschools in southern Sweden (Bobrowicz et al., 2020). The purpose of this study was to integrate analogical transfer with functional tool-dependent problem solving and study how both skills develop in toddlerhood. The replication yielded similar results to the original experiment in all five hypotheses tested, with the main finding being that age is not a significant predictor of being able to display analogical transfer from task to task. As an extension to the variables examined in the study, two additional models were created to see whether spending more time with the functional tool or with the relevant apparatus leads to a greater percentage of successes in solving the test task, but there were no significant differences found in this model.