Metaphor

Riley's personality represents a variety of departments and control panels in the movie's fundamental metaphor, which depicts the mind as a headquarters. During Riley's infancy, the control panel is shown as a single button, emphasizing the simplicity of a newborn's mind, eager for new experiences. Riley experiences new emotions as he gets older, which results in an increasingly complex control panel with knobs, switches, dials, and levers. Riley's emotional responses are then determined by various emotions operating on this panel. 

The movie's usage of metaphor highlights how complicated the human mind is by depicting it as a headquarters with control panels and memory workers controlled by emotions.