This article describes an integrated theory of analogical access and mapping, instantiated in a

Recent constraint-satisfaction models of explanation, analogy, and decision making claim that these processes are influenced by bidirectional constraints that promote coherence. College students were asked to reach a verdict in a complex legal case involving multiple conflicting arguments, including alternative analogies to the target case. Participants rated agreement with the individual arguments both in isolation before seeing the case, and again after reaching a verdict. Assessments of the individual arguments (including the competing analogies) shifted so as to cohere with their emerging verdict. Information about the character of the defendant in the initial case triggered a cascade of "spreading coherence", influencing decisions made about a subsequent case involving very different legal issues. Participants ' memory for their initial positions also shifted so as to cohere with their final positions. The coherence shifts were simulated by a constraint satisfaction model. The results demonstrate that an alogical process of constraint satisfaction can transform highly ambiguous inputs into coherent decisions. Bidirectional Reasoning 3 One of the most deep-rooted assumptions about human reasoning is that the flow of

The ways in which analogy was used in a nonexperimental environment—politics—was investigated. We used the framework developed in analogy research to analyze the selection of analogical sources in political discourse. We took all the analogies reported in newspapers during the final week of a referendum campaign in Canada and analyzed the features of the different analogies used. We identified 234 analogies and analyzed the range over which analogies were used, semantic categories of analogies, goals of the analogizer, and emotional connotation of the analogies. Our results reveal that analogy was frequently used, that over two-thirds of the analogical sources were nonpolitical, and that many of the sources had strong emotional connotations. Furthermore, the goal of the analogizer influenced the selection of sources. We conclude that characteristics of the audience and emotionality of the source analog are important features in the selection of source analogs.

: Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) are a method for encoding nested relational structures in fixed width vector representations. HRRs encode relational structures as vector representations in such a way that the superficial similarity of the vectors reflects both superficial and structural similarity of the relational structures. HRRs also support a number of operations that could be very useful in psychological models of human analogy processing: fast estimation of superficial and structural similarity via a vector dot-product; finding corresponding objects in two structures; and chunking of vector representations. Although similarity assessment and discovery of corresponding objects both theoretically take exponential time to perform fully and accurately, with HRRs one can obtain approximate solutions in constant time. The accuracy of these operations with HRRs mirrors patterns of human performance on analog retrieval and processing tasks. Keywords: neural networks, distributed representations, binding, analogy, analog retrieval, structure, chunking, systematicity 1

Over the last few years a number of schemes for encoding compositional structure in distributed representations have been proposed, e.g., Smolensky's tensor products, Pollack's RAAMs, Plate's HRRs, Halford et al's STAR model, and Kanerva's binary spatter codes. All of these schemes can placed in a general framework involving superposition and binding of patterns. Viewed in this way, it is often simple to decide whether what can be achieved within one scheme will be able to be achieved in another. Furthermore, placing these schemes in a general framework reveals unexplored regions in which other related representation schemes with interesting properties. 1 Introduction Distributed representations are one of the most compelling ideas in connectionism. The use of distributed representations has endowed many connectionist models with their intriguing properties: ability to learn, parallel processing, soft capacity limits, and fault tolerance. However the difficulty of representing composit...

When people use analogies to solve problems they form an analogical mapping between two domains of knowledge. This mapping may support inferences by analogy that suggest a novel solution to a problem. Several factors have been proposed to be important in selecting this mapping, from among several alternative mappings: structural factors (systematicity and structural consistency) and pragmatic factors (the exploitation of higher-order planning categories). We suggest another set of factors play a role in selecting mappings: adaptability factors. Specifically, if a mapped solution can be adapted easily to a problem, then it will be preferred over an alternative mapping that is less adaptable. Two experiments are reported which test the effects of pragmatic and adaptation factors; using a novel technique in which the story analogue used has two alternative plans either of which can be used to solve an insight problem. In Experiment 1, these plans were varied in terms of their pragmatic-im...

this article should be addressed to Robert L. Goldstone, Psychology Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405. Electronic mail may be sent via Internet to rgoldsto@indiana.edu. Further information can be found at http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu

The cognitive process of analogical reasoning has generally been thought to occur in at least three stages: retrieval of a source description from memory, mapping of that source description to the target description, and transfer of relationships from source to target. Here we are concerned with the first stage, the retrieval of relevant sources from long-term memory for their use in analogical reasoning. Specifically we ask: what can people retrieve from long-term memory when stimulated by a description of some situation, and how do they do it? Psychological experiments suggest that subjects display two sorts of retrieval patterns: a novice pattern and an expert pattern. Those subjects that show the novice pattern are much more likely to retrieve so-called merely-apparently-similar sources to a target description rather than analogically-related sources. Merelyapparently-similar sources for a target are characterized by the two descriptions sharing superficial features, such as the types or identities of objects or actors involved, whereas in an analogical relationship the source and target share description structure that is useful for making analogical inferences. In contrast to those who show the novice pattern, those subjects who show the expert pattern are much more likely to retrieve analogically-related sources to a target stimulus, as long as the target and sources fall into a domain in which

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