Poster #30 - Inhibitory Control Efficiency in Analogical Reasoning with Children and Adults: A Developmental Negative Priming Study

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Analogical reasoning is one of the most important ways in which individuals gradually make sense of their world (Morrison, Hummel, & Holyoak, 2012). A large body of evidence suggests that children have difficulties in analogical mapping even at age 5 to 6 (Glady, French, & Thibaut, 2017). Recent literature attempted to explain children’s poor performance in analogical mapping from the perspective of executive function, especially inhibitory control (Begolli, Richland, Jaeggi, 2015; Chuderska, & Chuderski, 2013). Researchers investigated inhibitions over misleading strategies using the negative priming paradigm, in which a misleading strategy had to be inhibited on the prime but activated on the probe. Furthermore, the efficiency of the inhibitory control over misleading strategies is reflected from the magnitude of the NP effect (Borst, Pineau, Cassotti, & Houde, 2013, Aite, et al., 2016). Smaller NP effects reveal a lower executive cost and indicate a more efficient inhibitory control of strategies in cognitive processing (Aite, et al., 2016; Borst, Poirel, & Cassotti, 2013). Therefore, the aim of the current study was first to use the negative priming paradigm to focus on the association between inhibitory control efficiency and analogical mapping performance. Then, we explored how cognitive demands and task difficulties affect the inhibitory control efficiency in analogical mapping and how this effect varies across development.
We examined inhibitory control efficiency in analogical mapping using the negative priming (NP) paradigm, in which a misleading strategy had to be inhibited on the prime but activated on the probe (see Figure 1.). In Experiment 1, 34 7-year-olds, 30 10-year-olds, and 37 adults completed the NP analogical size-mapping task, where they had to select an item from a novel array to match the size rank of an item in the reference array. Participants completed two conditions where either perceptual or analogical strategy was primed and the other one was tested. As a measurement of interference, the NP effect was calculated as the reaction time difference of the same analogical strategy between the two conditions. We found that NP effects decreased with age, suggesting the efficiency of inhibitory control in analogical mapping increased with age. In Experiment 2, 33 7-year-olds, 38 10-year-olds, and 34 adults completed a similar but less demanding task. Notably, 10-year-olds showed similar magnitude of NP effects as adults, revealing that the efficiency of inhibitory control in analogical mapping is related to task difficulty and cognitive load. In both experiments, NP effects were evidently in children and adults, indicating that analogical mapping ability requires not only the acquisition of underlying analogical rules but also the inhibition over misleading strategies. Even adults, who have a mature understanding of analogical rules, were still affected by misleading perceptual cues; compared to children, they were able to inhibit misleading cues more efficiently, but this superiority disappeared when the task was less demanding.

Authors

• YU XIAO, School of Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Yinghe Chen, Beijing Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Qinyi Lin, School of Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Xuanzhou Cheng, School of Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author