Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Explanatory reasoning is a capacity at the core of human cognition. From an early age, children begin asking why-questions and seem to produce explanations to these questions with remarkable ease. However, the mechanisms underlyingexplanatory reasoning are only now being uncovered. Recently, Hoyos and Gentner (2017) revealed that comparison playsan important role in explanatory reasoning. To further examine this hypothesis, we conducted a study with childrenbetween the ages of 4 and 12 (N = 55) aimed at testing whether the similarity between two concepts affected childrensability to explain a relation between these concepts. Specifically, we tested whether children would more rapidly produceexplanations of why-questions like Why are trains bigger than cars? (high-similarity) compared to Why are trains biggerthan row boats? (low-similarity). Consistent with prior work, we found that children more rapidly produced explanationsof the relation between high-similarity concepts compared to low-similarity concepts.