PRESENTATION
After graduating in cognitive developmental psychology, Lucas Raynal did a PhD and a first post-doc in Paris (Université Cergy-Paris, Université Paris-Cité). He is currently a lecturer and a post-doctoral fellow at the Université de Genève and the Université Grenoble-Alpes.
His research mainly focuses on analogical reasoning. During his thesis, he demonstrated that adults, but also young children, deal with incoming situations by analogy with familiar experiences sharing deep similarities. He uses both behavioral and electrophysiological measures (EEG) in his empirical investigations. Since he became a post-doctoral researcher, his work can be divided in three main topics. The first one has to do with the role of analogy in lexical development, and is aimed at studying analogical abilities underlying category learning and generalization in young children. Another line of research is dedicated to informing the mechanisms of memory access allowing one to retrieve past episodes that can be used to implement analogies. Today, he is particularly interested by the educational implications of his work, and tries to characterize how analogies implemented by pupils constrain their understanding and mediate knowledge transfer.