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Abstract
The present study examined analogical reasoning in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and its relationship with cognitive and executive functioning and processing strategies. Our findings showed that although children with ASD were less competent in solving analogical problems than typically developing children, this inferior performance was attributable to general cognitive impairments. Eye-movement analyses revealed that children with ASD paid less attention to relational items and showed fewer gaze shifts between relational locations. Nevertheless, these eye-movement patterns did not predict autistic children’s behavioral performance. Together, our findings suggest that ASD per se does not entail impairments in analogical reasoning. The inferior performance of autistic children on analogical reasoning tasks is attributable to deficits in general cognitive and executive functioning.
Highlights
Analogical reasoning involves identifying similarities between exemplars and transferring attributes from one exemplar to another exemplar (Gentner, 1983, 2003)
These analyses provide further information about whether differences between the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) groups were attributable to intelligence
These results suggest that behavioral performance on scene analogy tasks was determined by different factors between the ASD and TD groups: for TD children, relational interpretation explained most of the individual differences, whereas for children with ASD, intelligence was the most robust predictor of behavioral performance
Summary
Analogical reasoning involves identifying similarities between exemplars and transferring attributes from one exemplar to another exemplar (Gentner, 1983, 2003). This process allows individuals to extract information from the environment and apply the information to new contexts (Holyoak et al, 1984), and serves as a building block for higher-order functions such as categorization (Namy and Gentner, 2002), problem solving (Tunteler and Resing, 2002), metaphor (Gentner, 1988), symbolic understanding (DeLoache, 1987), and social function (Liu et al, 1997; Landau et al, 2010). When identifying correspondences between items, individuals can focus on either shared surface features or shared relational structures. Developmental research shows that young children tend to focus on surface features and match items based on physical similarities. Children undergo a ‘perceptual-torelational shift’, whereby they pay more attention to underlying attributes and match items based
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