Keith James Holyoak is a Canadian–American researcher in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, working on human thinking and reasoning. Holyoak's work focuses on the role of analogy in thinking. His work showed how analogy can be used to enhance learning of new abstract concepts by both children and adults, as well as how reasoning breaks down in cases of brain damage.

Analogy is a comparison or correspondence between two things because of a third element that they are considered to share.