Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Table of Contents - 2008 - Volume 31, Issue 06  

Open Peer Commentary

Analogy and conceptual change in childhood

John E. Opfera1 and Leonidas A. A. Doumasa2

a1 Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43206 opfer.7@osu.edu

a2 Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405. adoumas@indiana.edu

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.

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