Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T08:31:05.528Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Analogy and conceptual change in childhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2008

John E. Opfer  and
Leonidas A. A. Doumas
John E. Opfer
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH [email protected]
Leonidas A. A. Doumas
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405. [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Analogical inferences are an important consequence of the way semantic knowledge is represented, that is, with relations as explicit structures that can take arguments. We review evidence that this feature of semantic cognition successfully predicts how quickly and broadly children's concepts change with experience and show that Rogers & McClelland's (R&M's) parallel distributed processing (PDP) model fails to simulate these cognitive changes due to its handling of relational information.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 31 , Issue 6 , December 2008 , pp. 723
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Carey, S. (1985) Conceptual change in childhood. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Doumas, L. A. A., Hummel, J. E. & Sandhofer, C. M. (2008) A theory of the discovery and predication of relational concepts. Psychological Review 115(1):1–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gentner, D. (1989) The mechanisms of analogical learning. In: Similarity and analogical reasoning, ed. Vosniadou, S. & Ortony, A., pp. 199–241. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holyoak, K. J. & Thagard, P. (1995) Mental leaps: Analogy in creative thought. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hummel, J. E. & Holyoak, K. J. (2003) A symbolic-connectionist theory of relational inference and generalization. Psychological Review 110:220–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keil, F. C. (1989) Concepts, kinds, and cognitive development. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Murphy, G. L. & Medin, D. L. (1985) The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psychological Review 92:289–316.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Opfer, J. E. (2002) Identifying living and sentient kinds from dynamic information: The case of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement in conceptual change. Cognition 86:97–122.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Opfer, J. E. & Bulloch, M. J. (2007) Causal relations drive young children's induction, naming, and categorization. Cognition 105:207–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Opfer, J. E. & Siegler, R. S. (2004) Revisiting preschoolers' living things concept: A microgenetic analysis of conceptual change in basic biology. Cognitive Psychology 49:301–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Richland, L. E., Morrison, R. G. & Holyoak, K. J. (2006) Children's development of analogical reasoning: Insights from scene analogy problems. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 94:249–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rogers, T. T. & McClelland, J. L. (2004) Semantic cognition: A parallel distributed processing approach. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schultz, J., Imamizu, H., Kawato, M. & Frith, C. (2004) Activation of the human superior temporal gyrus during observation of goal attribution by intentional objects. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16:1695–705.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed