Why do children struggle on analogical reasoning tasks? Considering the role of problem format by measuring visual attention.

Given the importance of analogical reasoning to bootstrapping children's understanding of the world, why is this ability so challenging for children? Two common sources of error have been implicated: 1) children's inability to prioritize 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, finding that children and adults attended differently to distractors, and that this attention predicted performance. These results provide the most direct evidence to date that feature based distraction is an important way children and adults differ during early analogical reasoning. In contrast to recent work using propositional analogies, we find no differences in children and adults' prioritization of relational information during problem solving, and while there are some differences in general attentional strategies across age groups, neither prioritization of relational information nor attentional strategy predict successful problem solving. Together, our results suggest that analogy problem format should be taken into account when considering developmental factors in children's analogical reasoning.