Working memory predicts children's analogical reasoning.

Analogical reasoning is the cognitive skill of drawing relationships between representations, often between prior knowledge and new representations, that allows for bootstrapping cognitive and language development. Analogical reasoning proficiency develops substantially during childhood, although the mechanisms underlying this development have been debated, with developing cognitive resources as one proposed mechanism. We explored the role of executive function (EF) in supporting children's analogical reasoning development, with the goal of determining whether predicted aspects of EF were related to analogical development at the level of individual differences. We assessed 5- to 11-year-old children's working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility using measures from the National Institutes of Health Toolbox Cognition battery. Individual differences in children's working memory best predicted performance on an analogical mapping task, even when controlling for age, suggesting a fundamental interrelationship between analogical reasoning and working memory development. These findings underscore the need to consider cognitive capacities in comprehensive theories of children's reasoning development.

How Can We Best Assess Spatial Skills? Practical and Conceptual Challenges.

Spatial thinking skills are associated with performance, persistence, and achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) school subjects. Because STEM knowledge and skills are integral to developing a well-trained workforce within and beyond STEM, spatial skills have become a major focus of cognitive, developmental, and educational research. However, these efforts are greatly hampered by the current lack of access to reliable, valid, and well-normed spatial tests. Although there are hundreds of spatial tests, they are often hard to access and use, and information about their psychometric properties is frequently lacking. Additional problems include (1) substantial disagreement about what different spatial tests measure-even two tests with similar names may measure very different constructs; (2) the inability to measure some STEM-relevant spatial skills by any existing tests; and (3) many tests only being available for specific age groups. The first part of this report delineates these problems, as documented in a series of structured and open-ended interviews and surveys with colleagues. The second part outlines a roadmap for addressing the problems. We present possibilities for developing shared testing systems that would allow researchers to test many participants through the internet. We discuss technological innovations, such as virtual reality, which could facilitate the testing of navigation and other spatial skills. Developing a bank of testing resources will empower researchers and educators to explore and support spatial thinking in their disciplines, as well as drive the development of a comprehensive and coherent theoretical understanding of spatial thinking.

Spatial alignment supports comparison of life science images.

Visual comparisons are pervasive in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) instruction and practice. In previous work, adults' visual comparisons of simple stimuli were faster and more accurate when the layout of a display facilitated alignment of corresponding elements-the spatial alignment principle (Matlen et al., 2020). Here, we asked whether the spatial alignment principle extends to rich, educationally relevant stimuli, and how prior experience and spatial skill relate to spatial alignment effects. Participants were asked to find an incorrect bone within a skeleton, presented individually or paired with a correct skeleton in a layout that did (direct placement) or did not (impeded placement) support alignment (Kurtz & Gentner, 2013). Consistent with the spatial alignment principle, undergraduates (Study 1) showed an advantage of direct over impeded placement. Middle schoolers (Study 2) showed a direct advantage on items presented in atypical orientations. That atypical items showed the strongest effects suggests that direct placement may help most when materials are less familiar. However, neither individual differences in undergraduates' STEM course history, nor undergraduates' or middle schoolers' spatial skills moderated spatial alignment effects. Thus, applying the spatial alignment principle in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics has potential to improve visual comparisons, especially those that are challenging, for students of all spatial skill levels. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

What's in a name? Brain activity reveals categorization processes differ across languages.

The linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that speakers of different languages perceive and conceptualize the world differently, but do their brains reflect these differences? In English, most nouns do not provide linguistic clues to their categories, whereas most Mandarin Chinese nouns provide explicit category information, either morphologically (e.g., the morpheme "vehicle" che1 in the noun "train" huo3che1) or orthographically (e.g., the radical "bug" chong2 in the character for the noun "butterfly" hu2die2). When asked to judge the membership of atypical (e.g., train) vs. typical (e.g., car) pictorial exemplars of a category (e.g., vehicle), English speakers (N = 26) showed larger N300 and N400 event-related potential (ERP) component differences, whereas Mandarin speakers (N = 27) showed no such differences. Further investigation with Mandarin speakers only (N = 22) found that it was the morphologically transparent items that did not show a typicality effect, whereas orthographically transparent items elicited moderate N300 and N400 effects. In a follow-up study with English speakers only (N = 25), morphologically transparent items also showed different patterns of N300 and N400 activation than nontransparent items even for English speakers. Together, these results demonstrate that even for pictorial stimuli, how and whether category information is embedded in object names affects the extent to which typicality is used in category judgments, as shown in N300 and N400 responses.

Analogical Comparison Promotes Theory-of-Mind Development.

Theory-of-mind (ToM) is an integral part of social cognition, but how it develops remains a critical question. There is evidence that children can gain insight into ToM through experience, including language training and explanatory interactions. But this still leaves open the question of how children gain these insights-what processes drive this learning? We propose that analogical comparison is a key mechanism in the development of ToM. In Experiment 1, children were shown true- and false-belief scenarios and prompted to engage in multiple comparisons (e.g., belief vs. world). In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 3, children saw a series of true- and false-belief events, varying in order and in their alignability. Across these experiments, we found that providing support for comparing true- and false-belief scenarios led to increased performance on false-belief tests. These findings show that analogical comparison can support ToM learning.

Generating Relations Elicits a Relational Mindset in Children.

Relational reasoning is a hallmark of human higher cognition and creativity, yet it is notoriously difficult to encourage in abstract tasks, even in adults. Generally, young children initially focus more on objects, but with age become more focused on relations. While prerequisite knowledge and cognitive resource maturation partially explains this pattern, here we propose a new facet important for children's relational reasoning development: a general orientation to relational information, or a relational mindset. We demonstrate that a relational mindset can be elicited, even in 4-year-old children, yielding greater than expected spontaneous attention to relations. Children either generated or listened to an experimenter state the relationships between objects in a set of formal analogy problems, and then in a second task, selected object or relational matches according to their preference. Children tended to make object mappings, but those who generated relations on the first task selected relational matches more often on the second task, signaling that relational attention is malleable even in young children.

Stereotype Threat Effects on Learning From a Cognitively Demanding Mathematics Lesson.

Stereotype threat-a situational context in which individuals are concerned about confirming a negative stereotype-is often shown to impact test performance, with one hypothesized mechanism being that cognitive resources are temporarily co-opted by intrusive thoughts and worries, leading individuals to underperform despite high content knowledge and ability (see Schmader & Beilock, ). We test here whether stereotype threat may also impact initial student learning and knowledge formation when experienced prior to instruction. Predominantly African American fifth-grade students provided either their race or the date before a videotaped, conceptually demanding mathematics lesson. Students who gave their race retained less learning over time, enjoyed the lesson less, reported a diminished desire to learn more, and were less likely to choose to engage in an optional math activity. The detrimental impact was greatest among students with high baseline cognitive resources. While stereotype threat has been well documented to harm test performance, the finding that effects extend to initial learning suggests that stereotype threat's contribution to achievement gaps may be greatly underestimated.

Analogy, higher order thinking, and education.

Analogical reasoning, the ability to understand phenomena as systems of structured relationships that can be aligned, compared, and mapped together, plays a fundamental role in the technology rich, increasingly globalized educational climate of the 21st century. Flexible, conceptual thinking is prioritized in this view of education, and schools are emphasizing 'higher order thinking', rather than memorization of a cannon of key topics. The lack of a cognitively grounded definition for higher order thinking, however, has led to a field of research and practice with little coherence across domains or connection to the large body of cognitive science research on thinking. We review literature on analogy and disciplinary higher order thinking to propose that relational reasoning can be productively considered the cognitive underpinning of higher order thinking. We highlight the utility of this framework for developing insights into practice through a review of mathematics, science, and history educational contexts. In these disciplines, analogy is essential to developing expert-like disciplinary knowledge in which concepts are understood to be systems of relationships that can be connected and flexibly manipulated. At the same time, analogies in education require explicit support to ensure that learners notice the relevance of relational thinking, have adequate processing resources available to mentally hold and manipulate relations, and are able to recognize both the similarities and differences when drawing analogies between systems of relationships.