Neurocognitive Process Constraints on Analogy: What Changes to Allow Children to Reason like Adults?

Analogy employs a neurocognitive working-memory (WM) system to activate and bind relational representations, integrate multiple relations, and suppress distracting information. Analogy experiments exploring these processes have used a variety of methodologies including dual tasks, neuropsychology, and functional neuroimaging, as well as experiments with children and older adults. Collectively, these experiments provide a rich set of results useful in evaluating any model of analogy and its development.