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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]
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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

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