Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Given the importance of developing analogical reasoning tobootstrapping children’s understanding of the world, why isthis ability so challenging for children? Two commonmechanisms have been implicated: 1) children’s inability toprioritize relational information during initial problem solving;2) children’s inability to disengage from salient distractors.Here, we use eye tracking to examine children and adults’looking patterns when solving scene analogies, allowing fordifferentiation between attention to relations versus tofeaturally salient distractors. In contrast to a recent study withpropositional analogies, our data suggest prioritization ofsource information does not differ between adults and children,nor is it predictive of performance; however, children andadults attend differently to distractors, and this attentionpredicts performance. These results suggest that feature-baseddistraction is a key way children and adults differ duringanalogical reasoning, and that the analogy problem formatshould be taken into account when considering children’sanalogical reasoning.