Exploring how visual attention, inhibitory control, and co-speech gesture instruction contribute to children’s analogical reasoning ability

Abstract

Analogical reasoning is an important, but difficult skill to develop. Here, we consider (1) whether children’s difficulty with analogical reasoning can be understood by measuring visual attention during analogy problem solving and a measure of inhibitory control, which researchers have suggested plays an integral role in analogical reasoning, and (2) whether analogical reasoning can be supported with co-speech gesture instruction. Children (4–5 year-olds) solved scene analogies before and after speech-alone or speech + gesture instruction. Results suggest relations exist between some behavioral performance measures, inhibitory control, and visual attention, but some of these relations change after instruction. During instruction, gesture led to more mature looking patterns, although this did not predict performance: All children showed gains from pretest to posttest. We consider how these findings extend prior gesture and analogical reasoning literature, call for replication of these findings, and identify future directions of research.