The relationship of analogical distance to analogical function and preinventive structure: the case of engineering design

Analogy was studied in real-world engineering design, using the in vivo method. Analogizing was found to occur frequently, entailing a roughly equal amount of within- and between-domain analogies. In partial support for theories of unconscious plagiarism (Brown & Murphy, 1989; Marsh, Landau, & Hicks, 1996) and Ward's (1994) path-of-least-resistance model, it was found that the reference to exemplars (in the form of prototypes) significantly reduced the number of between-domain analogies between source and target, as compared with using sketches or no external representational systems. Analogy served three functions in relation to novel design concepts: identifying problems, solving problems, and explaining concepts. Problem identifying analogies were mainly within domain, explanatory analogies were mainly between domain, and problem-solving analogies were a mixture of within- and between-domain analogies.     

Automatic activation of categorical and abstract analogical relations in analogical reasoning

We examined activation of concepts during analogical reasoning. Subjects made either analogical judgments or categorical judgments about four-word sets. After each four-word set, they named the ink color of a single word in a modified Stroop task. Words that referred to category relations were primed (as indicated by longer response times on Stroop color naming) subsequent to analogical judgments and categorical judgments. This finding suggests that activation of category concepts plays a fundamental role in analogical thinking. When colored words referred to analogical relations, priming occurred subsequent to analogical judgments, but not to categorical judgments, even though identical four-word stimuli were used for both types of judgments. This finding lends empirical support to the hypothesis that, when people comprehend the analogy between two items, they activate an abstract analogical relation that is distinct from the specific content items that compose the analogy.     

Selective reminding procedure in depression and dementia

Patients with mild dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT), patients with major depression, and normal elderly control subjects were administered a verbal learning task using the selective reminding procedure. Depressed patients were impaired on total recall and the proportion of items retained from one trial to the next without reminding and did not benefit from imagery in retaining items over consecutive trials. The DAT patients were impaired on all measures derived from the test, including storage and recognition memory. With the exception of the ability to benefit from imagery, all of the measures distinguished depressed and mild DAT patients. These findings are consistent with deficient encoding in DAT and performance deficits as a function of effortful cognitive processing in depression.     

Psychological science in a postmodern context.

Postmodern scholarship poses significant challenges to pivotal assumptions of individual knowledge, objectivity, and truth. In their place, an emphasis is placed on the communal construction of knowledge, objectivity as a relational achievement, and language as a pragmatic medium through which local truths are constituted. Although these developments in understanding may seem opposed to psychological science, they are not. Rather, they invite a new range of questions about the potentials of traditional research. These questions are vitally concerned with the significance of such inquiry in cultural life. More importantly, this emerging view of psychological science opens new and exciting vistas of theoretical, methodological, and practical significance. Increasing manifestations of movement in these directions suggest the possibility of profound change in the profession.     

The next generation: the value of reminding

In two experiments, we investigated the influence of repeated processing in the context of the generation effect. In both experiments, participants studied words once or twice. Once-studied words either were read or were generated from a definition. Twice-studied words were read both times, generated both times, or read once and generated once. Free recall was best (in order of decreasing performance) after generating twice, after generating plus reading, and finally after generating once; any generation was better than purely reading. Recognition showed a similar pattern, except that the benefit of generating twice was not as striking as in recall and that reading plus generating was just as effective as generating twice. The overall pattern of results is accounted for by a simple model in which a second encoding results in a reminding of the first encoding, and this additional encoding supports subsequent recollection. This reminding is, consequently, more effective in recall than in recognition, and it operates in accordance with the principles of transfer-appropriate processing.     

Facilitation and analogical transfer in the THOG task

This study was concerned with Wason's THOG task, a hypothetico-deductive reasoning problem for which performance is typically very poor (<20% correct). Recently, however, Needham and Amado (1995) and Koenig and Griggs (2004) have observed both facilitation and spontaneous analogical transfer effects for the Pythagoras version of this task. Based on their findings, Koenig and Griggs concluded that in addition to the separation of the data (the properties of the designated THOG) from the hypotheses that need to be generated (the possible combinations of properties written down), an explicit request to generate these hypotheses is necessary to obtain significant analogical transfer. In the present study we extended the generalisability of this conclusion in three experiments with 214 undergraduate participants using O'Brien et al.'s (1990) Blackboard version of the task. We discuss the relationship of the results to dual process theories of reasoning and propose that analogical transfer may be a better criterion than task facilitation for judging participants' task understanding.     

Metaphoric comprehension: Studies in reminding and resembling

The theoretical problems posed by metaphoric comprehension are discussed in the context of experiments on prompted recall. Listeners heard sentences of the form “Topic is (like) Vehicle.” In most cases, a statement of the implicit resemblance (the “ground”) was very effective in prompting recall of its related metaphor. This result could not be attributed to the activation, transfer, or additive combination of pre-existing properties of the topic and vehicle terms or to pre-existing associations between grounds and sentence terms. It is argued that the vehicle domain guides a novel schematization of the topic domain, that the perceived resemblance is a higher-order relation among entities (both explicit and implicit) in each domain, and that this abstract relation constitutes the “functional memory unit.” Prompted recall may begin with recognition of this previously experienced relation.     

Surface and structural similarity in analogical transfer

Two experiments investigated factors that influence the retrieval and use of analogies in problem solving, Experiment 1 demonstrated substantial spontaneous analogical transfer with a delay of several days between presentation of the source and target analogues. Experiment 2 examined the influence of different types of similarity between the analogues. A mechanism for retrieval of source analogues is proposed, based on summation of activation from features shared with a target problem. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that both structural features, which play a causal role in determining possible problem solutions, and salient surface features, which do not have a causal role, influence spontaneous selection of an analogue. Structural features, however, have a greater impact than do surface features on a problem solver’s ability to use an analogue once its relevance has been pointed out.     

The science question in intelligent design

Intelligent Design creationism is often criticized for failing to be science because it falls afoul of some demarcation criterion between science and non-science. This paper argues that this objection to Intelligent Design is misplaced because it assumes that a consistent non-theological characterization of Intelligent Design is possible. In contrast, it argues that, if Intelligent Design is taken to be non-theological doctrine, it is not intelligible. Consequently, a demarcation criterion cannot be used to judge its status. This position has the added advantage of providing reasons to reject Intelligent Design creationism without invoking potentially philosophically controversial demarcation criteria.     

Psychological science in the public arena: Three cases of dubious influence

Psychological science has a great deal to contribute to social welfare in all societies, because the world's most pressing social problems are behavioral in nature—violence, hunger, drug abuse, environmental pollution, low worker productivity, poor educational outcomes, and so forth. Thus, psychological research can inform public policies to improve approaches to these important social problems. The relationship of psychological science to public policy is often troubled, however, by misunderstandings about the role of science in the policy making process. Many scientists fear that their research results will be "misused" by others whose values differ from those of scientists. Thus, psychologists are reluctant to publish research results that can be used to support policies contrary to their own values and hesitate to ask research questions that can generate politically incorrect results. In this article, I argue that psychological science has a primary responsibility to ask dangerous questions and to report results honestly, without fear of their use; that research is not translated directly into public policies; and that psychological science should not be perverted either by fear of political consequences or by compromising truth in a quest for power. Three research examples are given to illustrate the different faces of temptation to pervert psychological science in a misguided hope that scientists' own values will be reflected in public policies.     

Transformational and derivational strategies in analogical problem solving

Analogical problem solving is mostly described as transfer of a source solution to a target problem based on the structural correspondences (mapping) between source and target. Derivational analogy (Carbonell, Machine learning: an artificial intelligence approach Los Altos. Morgan Kaufmann, 1986) proposes an alternative view: a target problem is solved by replaying a remembered problem-solving episode. Thus, the experience with the source problem is used to guide the search for the target solution by applying the same solution technique rather than by transferring the complete solution. We report an empirical study using the path finding problems presented in Novick and Hmelo (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 20:1296–1321, 1994) as material. We show that both transformational and derivational analogy are problem-solving strategies realized by human problem solvers. Which strategy is evoked in a given problem-solving context depends on the constraints guiding object-to-object mapping between source and target problem. Specifically, if constraints facilitating mapping are available, subjects are more likely to employ a transformational strategy, otherwise they are more likely to use a derivational strategy.     

The role of reminding in long-term memory for temporal order

Order codes are one of the three main types of information that have been hypothesized to underlie memory for the times of life events. Published evidence for the theory, however, has come exclusively from research in which brief retention intervals have been used. In the first of two studies, 101 adults judged the order of pairs of movies released 5-14 years ago, half of which shared a common major actor. There was no evidence that related films could be ordered more accurately than unrelated ones. In the second study, 88 students were presented with in-class announcements that were either related or unrelated to an earlier announcement. Three weeks later,they judged the order of the pairs of announcements. There was no difference between the accuracy for the related and the unrelated pairs. The findings do not support the proposal that the automatic creation of order information at the time of encoding contributes to autobiographical memory.     

Examining the contributions of desirable difficulty and reminding to the spacing effect

Although substantial evidence indicates that spacing repeated study events with intervening material generally enhances memory performance relative to massing study events, the mechanism underlying this benefit is less clear. Two experiments examined the role of reminding difficulty during the acquisition of material in modulating final memory performance for spaced repetitions utilizing recognition (Experiment 1) and recall tests (Experiment 2). Specifically, participants studied a list of words presented one or two times separated by one or five items. On each trial participants reported whether the item had been previously presented (i.e., repetition detection judgment), and the response latency served as a proxy for reminding difficulty such that longer response latencies reflected more difficult reminding. A third experiment extended this paradigm with the inclusion of a massed condition and novel lag conditions (three and ten items). Results revealed significant lag effects in final test performance across experiments despite comparable repetition detection difficulty between lag conditions during acquisition. Moreover, results from within-participant point-biserial analyses and mediation analyses converged on overall performance measures in suggesting that repetition detection difficulty failed to modulate final test performance in the current paradigm. Discussion considers the implications of the current results for mechanisms proposed to underlie the benefits of spaced study and spaced retrieval practice.     

Neural correlates of creativity in analogical reasoning

Brain-based evidence has implicated the frontal pole of the brain as important for analogical mapping. Separately, cognitive research has identified semantic distance as a key determinant of the creativity of analogical mapping (i.e., more distant analogies are generally more creative). Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess brain activity during an analogy generation task in which we varied the semantic distance of analogical mapping (as derived quantitatively from a latent semantic analysis). Data indicated that activity within an a priori region of interest in left frontopolar cortex covaried parametrically with increasing semantic distance, even after removing effects of task difficulty. Results implicate increased recruitment of frontopolar cortex as a mechanism for integrating semantically distant information to generate solutions in creative analogical reasoning.     

Neuroscientific insights into the development of analogical reasoning

Analogical reasoning, or the ability to find correspondences between entities based on shared relationships, supports knowledge acquisition. As such, the development of this ability during childhood is thought to promote learning. Here, we sought to better understand the mechanisms by which analogical reasoning about semantic relations improves over childhood and adolescence (e.g. chalk is to chalkboard as pen is to…?). We hypothesized that age‐related differences would manifest as differences in the brain regions associated with one or more of the following cognitive functions: (1) controlled semantic retrieval, or the ability to retrieve task‐relevant semantic associations; (2) response control, or the ability to override the tendency to respond to a salient distractor; and/or (3) relational integration, or the ability to consider jointly two mental relations. In order to test these hypotheses, we analyzed patterns of fMRI activation during performance of a pictorial propositional analogy task across 95 typically developing children between the ages of 6 and 18 years old. Despite large age‐related differences in task performance, particularly over ages 6–10 but through to around age 14, participants across the whole age range recruited a common network of frontal, parietal and temporal regions. However, activation in a brain region that has been implicated in controlled semantic retrieval – left anterior prefrontal cortex (BA 47/45) – was positively correlated with age, and also with performance after controlling for age. This finding indicates that improved performance over middle childhood and early adolescence on this analogical reasoning task is driven largely by improvements in the ability to selectively retrieve task‐relevant semantic relationships.     

Psychological processes and paranoia: implications for forensic behavioural science

Paranoid delusions have recently become the focus of empirical research. In this article, we review studies of the psychological mechanisms that might be involved in paranoid thinking and discuss their implications for forensic behaviour science. Paranoia has not been consistently associated with any specific neuropsychological abnormality. However, evidence supports three broad types of mechanism that might be involved in delusional thinking in general and paranoia in particular: anomalous perceptual experiences, abnormal reasoning, and motivational factors. There is some evidence that paranoia may be associated with hearing loss, and good evidence that paranoid patients attend excessively to threatening information. Although general reasoning ability seems to be unaffected, there is strong evidence that a jumping- to-conclusions style of reasoning about data is implicated in delusions in general, but less consistent evidence specifically linking paranoia to impaired theory of mind. Finally, there appears to be a strong association between paranoia and negative self-esteem, and some evidence that attempts to protect self-esteem by attributing negative events to external causes are implicated. Some of these processes have recently been implicated in violent behaviour, and they therefore have the potential to explain the apparent association between paranoid delusions and offending.     

Bootstrapping the mind: analogical processes and symbol systems

Human cognition is striking in its brilliance and its adaptability. How do we get that way? How do we move from the nearly helpless state of infants to the cognitive proficiency that characterizes adults? In this paper I argue, first, that analogical ability is the key factor in our prodigious capacity, and, second, that possession of a symbol system is crucial to the full expression of analogical ability.     

Twenty‐two years of psychological science in Psychological Science

The journal Psychological Science (PS) has undergone various changes over 22 years since its birth in 1990. Analysis of Web of Science's records shows that the publication has increased in volume and collaborations between authors, and has become more international. Keyword analysis suggests the new role of neuroscience in contemporary psychology and indicates that the PS of today is more oriented than in the 1990s towards psychosocial and emotional issues as well as natural situations in our daily lives (ecological validity).