CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The subprocesses of retrieval, mapping and inference generation have received fair attention within psychological and computational accounts of analogical thinking. However, the mechanism by which we evaluate the plausibility of the generated inferences within the target domain has been generally regarded as independent from the prior analogical comparison. We carried out a study to demonstrate: 1) that the evaluation of inferences is sometimes based on an extended analogical mapping and 2) that in that evaluation object properties that are not salient out of the analogy (analogical functional attributes - AFAs) play a crucial role. Twenty participants read six analogies. The base analog stated that an object had been successfully used to fulfill certain function. Then they were required to indicate (and justify) to what extent they considered that a second object would also fulfill a similar function in an analogous situation. Whereas in half of the analogies the target object shared the relevant AFA with the base object, in the other half it did not. The plausibility scores given to target objects sharing a relevant AFA with the base object were higher than those assigned to objects lacking such attribute. This difference cannot be attributed to a higher intrinsic plausibility of the former within the target domain, since it was not replicated by a group of participants who evaluated the usefulness of the target objects for the desired function, but without having previously received their corresponding base analogs. Whereas most participants in the analogy condition mentioned the AFAs in their justifications, few participants in the control group referred to them. Results show that the evaluation of analogical inferences sometimes implies reanalyzing the mapped elements and they suggest that certain properties that are not evident outside an analogical comparison (i.e., AFAs) play a crucial role in this evaluation.

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