Analogical problem-solving in preschool children

The present research contends that the classical design used in the investigation of analogical problem-solving undermines young children's abilities. The base analog is usually introduced as a story and the probability of extraction of the relational structure is then very low. The first experiment reveals that when the source is introduced as a guided problem-solving activity, most 5- to 6-years-old children do show analogical transfer. Experiment 2 enables us to better understand the role of perceptual similarity between base and target by highlighting the critical role of the conditions of the source encoding (problem-solving vs enacted story vs read story) in the probability of analogical transfer.