Insight into analogies: Evidence from eye movements

Eye movements were recorded while participants solved picture analogies in which they had to identify the object in one picture that "went with" an object in another, simultaneously presented picture. The pattern of saccades between objects, but not the time spent looking at objects, was a very sensitive measure of the time course of both relational and object-matching processes. The results show that processing of relations between objects precedes processing of matches between objects for young adults solving simple analogies.