Margaret Shideler¹, Yaxin Liu¹, Adam Green¹; ¹Georgetown University

Extracting and manipulating relational structure from visual information is central to human cognition. In mathematical contexts, visuospatial processes such as magnitude comparison, pattern recognition, and proportional reasoning play an important role in supporting symbolic mathematical competence. Of particular importance to this relationship is nonsymbolic proportional reasoning (NPR), or the ability to extract proportional relationships from non-numerical stimuli. However, the role of analogical reasoning—particularly when applied to proportional relationships—remains underexplored. This study investigates whether the ability to reason analogically about proportions predicts symbolic math performance, and how it relates to performance on traditional NPR tasks. Ten adult participants recruited from Prolific completed two traditional NPR tasks (area-based probability comparisons and clock reading) as well as a novel visual analogy task designed to integrate NPR and analogical reasoning. In the visual analogy task, participants compared two pairs of shapes with an area ratio of 1:1, 3:2, 2:1, 5:2, or 3:1. On each trial, participants judged whether the two pairs form a true or false analogy: a true analogy occurs when both pairs share the same ratio, while a false analogy occurs when they do not. Fraction fluency was assessed using a fraction sum estimation task. Preliminary findings indicated that performance on the visual analogies task showed similar trends as on traditional NPR tasks: in both the visual analogy task and the probability task, accuracy decreased as the ratios depicted in the stimuli became more similar. Moreover, initial analyses suggest that the strength of relationship between fraction fluency and NPR performance varies by task type (probability, clock, or visual analogy) and difficulty level. These findings highlight the broad role of proportional reasoning in supporting symbolic math fluency, as well as a potential role of analogical reasoning above and beyond NPR.