Children ' s Performance on a Spatial Analogies

GENTNER, DEDRE . Children's Performance on a Spatial Analogies Task . CHILD DEVELOPMENT , 1977, 48, 1034-1039 . Young children performed as well as or better than adults on tasks requiring use of spatial analogies . The tasks involved body-parts analogies, such as, "If this [pictured] mountain had a knee, where would it be?" The entities referred to were physical objects familiar to young children, and this question format clearly called for analogical responding . Thus, sources of confusion were minimized. In a pilot study, it was shown that preschool children could' apply such body-parts analogies to pictures as consistently as adults . The mappings were then made more difficult by varying the orientation of the pictured objects or by adding misleading pictorial details to the pictured objects . Adults performed somewhat less consistently than preschoolers and first graders when misleading details were present ; there were no age differences when orientation was varied . These results suggest that analogical ability is present at a very early age .