Higher-order structure and relational reasoning: contrasting analogical and thematic relations

A popular explanation of younger children's success in analogy tasks is that lower-level associative reasoning strategies are used. Younger children are said to have a primarily associative understanding of analogy, with the ability to coordinate sets of relations largely emerging later in development (Goldman, Pellegrino, Parseghian, & Sallis, 1982; Sternberg & Nigro, 1980). One way of testing the associative claim is to pit young children's emergent analogical abilities against thematic (associative) relations, which are known to play an important role in the knowledge structures of young children. The present experiments presented 4-, 5- and 9-year-old children with a:b::c:d analogies in a picture choice format, offering a choice between Analogy and Thematic responses. Only the Analogy responses were correct in terms of the higher-order structure of the analogies. The results showed that the Analogy responses were consistently preferred to the Thematic responses by children of all ages. It is concluded that analogy is an important building block for learning from an early age.