Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The Abstraction Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is a visual analogical reasoning test designed for humans and machines (Chollet, 2019). We compared human and large language model (LLM) performance on a new child-friendly set of ARC items. Results show that both children and adults outperform most LLMs on these tasks. Error analysis revealed a similar "fallback" solution strategy in LLMs and young children, where part of the analogy is simply copied. In addition, we found two other error types, one based on seemingly grasping key concepts (e.g., Inside-Outside) and the other based on simple combinations of analogy input matrices. On the whole, "concept" errors were more common in humans, and "matrix" errors were more common in LLMs. This study sheds new light on LLM reasoning ability and the extent to which we can use error analyses and comparisons with human development to understand how LLMs solve visual analogies.