Explaining the abundance of distant analogies in naturalistic observations of experts

MAXIMO TRENCH

Frontiers in Psychology

Frontiers

Lugar: Lausanne; Año: 2014

1664-1078

In line with recent observations of analogy use by experts working within their domain of expertise, Kretz and Krawczyk (2014) have found that the analogies produced by trained economists show a balance between the use of long-distance and semantically close source analogs. Taken together, the results from this rapidly-growing observational tradition call into question the results of traditional experimental studies showing that long-distance sources are rarely retrieved from long-term memory. The most accessible explanations for this inconsistency revolve around the expertise of the samples and the psychological constraints of the analogy generation environments. After reviewing the available studies on naturalistic analogy generation by novice participants, I argue for the role of task constraints as the sole explanation for the profusion of distant analogies obtained in experts studies, and suggest several overlooked mechanisms different from analogical retrieval that are likely to underlie such results.