Individual Differences in Attention to Analogical Relations

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ABSTRACT Children reasoning about the world must attend to not only visible objects but also the relations between them. For example, in mathematics classroom, it is crucial to notice not only objects in word problems, but also how they relate to each other mathematically. Attention to relations has generally been considered a function of domain knowledge or task-specific context, though we posit that individual differences in relational attention can be identified and may affect reasoning and learning across tasks. Individual differences in spontaneous relational attention were measured in a sample of 218 fifth/sixth grade children from the U.S. The latent class analysis revealed that children could be systematically grouped into four clusters based on how likely they were to attend to relational correspondences, and importantly, these differences predicted their learning from a videotaped mathematics lesson. Children who preferentially attended to relations systematically learned more from the same lesson than those who preferentially attended to objects, controlling for prior math knowledge and Executive Functions (EFs). At the same time, the latter group showed greater learning when the lesson explicitly highlighted relational correspondences, suggesting that relational attention is a key mechanism for learning, and also that this could ensure equity across students in learning from high-quality lessons.