Chapter II: Visual strategies in scene-oriented analogical problems
II. d. Discussion
The Path-Mapping Theory makes predictions about the eye movement patterns in the Scene Analogy task. It predicts that participants would focus more on the goal objects of the task (i.e., B and T), would make within domains saccades to encode the relations relative to each domain compared, and between the two objects corresponding in terms of roles which are at the center of the main goal of the task. As children experience difficulty maintaining goals over time (Marcovitch et al., 2010), we expected that these types of comparison would be less present in them than in adults, and as they make more distractor errors (Richland et al., 2006), we predicted more fixations on the perceptually-related-to-B distractor as well as more saccades involving B and this distractor in children than in adults, suggesting a lower ability to inhibit irrelevant information when solving an analogical reasoning task.
The present results bear out the prediction made by the Path-Mapping Theory about visual strategies in the Scene Analogy task. Participants focused on the stimuli that were relevant to the specific goals of the task (i.e., B and T), and made more saccades between these two elements and those linked to them by a relation in the source and the target pictures
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
AB AC AT ADis AU BC BT BDis BU CT CDis CU TDis TU DisU Percetage of saccades (% of total number of saccades)
6-7-y.-o.
Adults
114 (i.e., AB, and CT saccades). These intra-domain saccades might be related to participants trying to find the roles of the different stimuli taking part in the relation represented in the scenes. These roles might be kept active in working memory, and actively compared and aligned by the participants by making BT saccades. The other fixation times and number of saccades were comparatively low, meaning they were not particularly informative to participants while solving the problems (Deubel & Schneider, 1996; He & Kowler, 1992).
Note that the Path-Mapping Theory is the only theory predicting a mixed pattern of rates of saccades in this task (i.e., high rates of within-domain saccades to encode the relations, and high rates of between-domain saccades linked to the goal of the task). Other theories would predict either more within-domain or more between-domain saccades.
Even though our analysis differed from those used by Gordon & Moser (2007), we also found a great amount of fixation on goal objects (i.e., B and T) and the elements which were related to them (i.e., A and C), and a high rate of saccades between these objects.
However, due to differences in the analyses used, we cannot compare their results about the saccades between the object with an arrow in the source and the corresponding item (in terms of role) in the target with our data. It is possible that these authors overlooked the importance of this type of saccade, as they mainly focused on intra-domain saccades and did not report the values of BT saccades. These authors also reported greater fixation density on distractor object than on a control object perceptually dissimilar to B, which suggests that even adults paid attention to these distractors. Even if they did not compare it directly to the fixation times of objects implicated in the relation, the fixation time of the distractor is close to the one observed in objects involved in relations with goal objects. This was not found in our results, which can be explained by the shift of instructions (“what play the same role as the object pointed at?”), theirs (“what is like the object pointed at?”) being ambiguous about the type of similarity which had to be considered (perceptual or role similarity).
There were two types of errors in this task — namely, relational and perceptual distractor errors. Children made both at a higher rate than adults. These results concur with previous results obtained by Richland et al. (2006), although our children’s response accuracy in this study were 10% higher than in theirs. The higher rates of errors in children than in adults were observed along with longer looking times on perceptually-similar-to-B distractors, and lower rate of BT saccade. Thus, children's relational errors might result from the low number of saccades between B and T, because this saccade might be involved, as explained above, in the alignment of the two elements based on their roles, and in the comparison of
115 these roles. This might also be crucial for evaluating the accuracy of the answer chosen before giving it. Therefore, children seem to overlook the comparison and judgment of role similarity of their answer with the role of the stimulus pointed to in the source scene. This might have led them to give answers only on the basis of the relation inferred through CT saccades but not on the basis of the roles of the actors taking part in this relation, leading to relational errors. These results can be explained in the framework of goal maintenance. Children, experiencing difficulty to maintain the goal of the task might forget to make the comparisons that are relevant to this goal, i.e., comparisons between B and T.
Children also made more distractor errors than adults. This effect of distractors on the performance of children was accompanied by longer looks at distractors. Nevertheless, other saccades involving the distractor were not more frequent than in adults. However, although children spent more time looking at the distractor than adults, this stimulus was looked at to a low extent when compared to other stimuli. This can be related to the fact that 65% of the distracting errors were made by only 3 children. Hence, it is possible that these 3 children did not understand the task. Most children did not focus on perceptually-similar-to-B distractors.
The fact that these distractors did not capture children’s attention can explain why our young participants performed better than Richland et al.’s (2006) participants of the same age. This increased response accuracy might be due to our change of instructions which rendered the task clearer and thus excluded the perceptual distractor as a potential answer. Indeed, we asked participants to find the thing which “played the same role as the one with an arrow pointing at it”, when Richland et al. asked “who is like the stimulus with an arrow”. The term
“like” is ambiguous regarding the type of comparison which is expected (i.e., perceptual or role-based), and, consequently, could lead to a greater number of similar-to-B distractor errors.
The present results indeed suggest that participants have a specific visual strategy in the Scene Analogy task which might be due to specific goals of this task, and that children’s relational errors might be due to a neglect of the main goal, i.e., comparing the picture pointed to with the solution they want to give in terms of roles. It might be that a difference exist between visual strategies in this task and in the A:B::C:? task (Thibaut, French, Missault, et al., 2011). Experiment 2 of this chapter is dedicated to the direct comparison of these two tasks.
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