Understanding analogical reasoning : viewpoints from psychology and related disciplines

Analogy and metaphor have a long history of study in linguistics, education, philosophy and psychology. Consensus over what analogy is or how analogy functions in language and thought, however, has been elusive. This paper, the first in a two part series, examines these various research traditions, attempting to bring out major lines of agreement over the role of analogy in individual human experience. As well as being a general literature review which may be helpful for newcomers to the study of analogy, this paper attempts to extract from these literatures existing theories, models and concepts which may be interesting or useful for computational studies of analogical reasoning

Teaching and Learning by Analogy: Psychological Perspectives on the Parables of Jesus

Christian teachers are often encouraged to use Jesus’ teaching strategies as models for their own pedagogy. Jesus frequently utilized analogical comparisons, or parables, to help his learners understand elements of his Gospel message. Although teachers can use analogical models to facilitate comprehension, such models also can sow the seeds of confusion and misconception. Recent advances in cognitive psychology have provided new theoretical frameworks to help us understand how instructional analogies function in the teaching-learning process. The goal of this paper is to analyze Jesus’ analogical teaching from these psychological perspectives, with implications for all teachers who utilize instructional analogies. In addition to reviewing basic analogical learning processes, I explore a six-variable model to account systematically for potential analogical misconceptions

A unifying approach to reasoning by analogy

There has been, and still is, much interest in several disciplines in reasoning using analogy and similarity. Recent efforts in psychology and artificial intelligence have seen the development of general analogical reasoning mechanisms, which work on a variety of symbolic analogies from various domains. It is in the context of this work that this dissertation presents a unifying framework for analogy and similarity, which is designed to accomodate all current general theories and models of analogy. The approach places models of analogy into a unifying framework comprised of seven stages and four types of similarity. This framework allows current models to be assessed and compared, and deficiences observed. A new general model for analogy, which fits within this framework, is presented, overcoming many of the observed deficiences with other models. A computer program which embodies most of the key features of the new model is described, and the results of its application to several example analogies shown

Comparison and Mapping Facilitate Relation Discovery and Predication

Relational concepts play a central role in human perception and cognition, but little is known about how they are acquired. For example, how do we come to understand that physical force is a higher-order multiplicative relation between mass and acceleration, or that two circles are the same-shape in the same way that two squares are? A recent model of relational learning, DORA (Discovery of Relations by Analogy; Doumas, Hummel & Sandhofer, 2008), predicts that comparison and analogical mapping play a central role in the discovery and predication of novel higher-order relations. We report two experiments testing and confirming this prediction

Spontaneous Analogy by Piggybacking on a Perceptual System

Most computational models of analogy assume they are given a delineated source domain and often a specified target domain. These systems do not address how analogs can be isolated from large domains and spontaneously retrieved from long-term memory, a process we call spontaneous analogy. We present a system that represents relational structures as feature bags. Using this representation, our system leverages perceptual algorithms to automatically create an ontology of relational structures and to efficiently retrieve analogs for new relational structures from long-term memory. We provide a demonstration of our approach that takes a set of unsegmented stories, constructs an ontology of analogical schemas (corresponding to plot devices), and uses this ontology to efficiently find analogs within new stories, yielding significant time-savings over linear analog retrieval at a small accuracy cost.Comment: Proceedings of the 35th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 201

Verbal analogy problem sets: An inventory of testing materials.

Analogical reasoning is an active topic of investigation across education, artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive psychology, and related fields. In all fields of inquiry, explicit analogy problems provide useful tools for investigating the mechanisms underlying analogical reasoning. Such sets have been developed by researchers working in the fields of educational testing, AI, and cognitive psychology. However, these analogy tests have not been systematically made accessible across all the relevant fields. The present paper aims to remedy this situation by presenting a working inventory of verbal analogy problem sets, intended to capture and organize sets from diverse sources

Connectionist Inference Models

The performance of symbolic inference tasks has long been a challenge to connectionists. In this paper, we present an extended survey of this area. Existing connectionist inference systems are reviewed, with particular reference to how they perform variable binding and rule-based reasoning, and whether they involve distributed or localist representations. The benefits and disadvantages of different representations and systems are outlined, and conclusions drawn regarding the capabilities of connectionist inference systems when compared with symbolic inference systems or when used for cognitive modeling

Evaluation of Analogical Inferences Formed from Automatically Generated Representations of Scientific Publications

Humans regularly exploit analogical reasoning to generate potentially novel and useful inferences. We outline the Dr Inventor model that identifies analogies between research publications, describing recent work to evaluate the inferences that are generated by the system. Its inferences, in the form of subjectverb-object triples, can involve arbitrary combinations of source and target information. We evaluate three approaches to assess the quality of inferences. Firstly, we explore an n-gram based approach (derived from the Dr Inventor corpus). Secondly, we use ConceptNet as a basis for evaluating inferences. Finally, we explore the use of Watson Concept Insights (WCI) to support our inference evaluation process. Dealing with novel inferences arising from an ever growing corpus is a central concern throughout

Evaluation of Analogical Inferences Formed from Automatically Generated Representations of Scientific Publications

Humans regularly exploit analogical reasoning to generate potentially novel and useful inferences. We outline the Dr Inventor model that identifies analogies between research publications, describing recent work to evaluate the inferences that are generated by the system. Its inferences, in the form of subjectverb-object triples, can involve arbitrary combinations of source and target information. We evaluate three approaches to assess the quality of inferences. Firstly, we explore an n-gram based approach (derived from the Dr Inventor corpus). Secondly, we use ConceptNet as a basis for evaluating inferences. Finally, we explore the use of Watson Concept Insights (WCI) to support our inference evaluation process. Dealing with novel inferences arising from an ever growing corpus is a central concern throughout