IPEHCS   26259
INSTITUTO PATAGONICO DE ESTUDIOS DE HUMANIDADES Y CIENCIAS SOCIALES
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Spontaneous vs. voluntary analogical retrieval across different cognitive activities
Autor/es:
LAURA MARTINEZ FRONTERA; MAXIMO TRENCH; SANTIAGO AMORÍN; MARIA VALERIA OLGUIN
Lugar:
Paris
Reunión:
Congreso; Analogy 2017: The Fourth Analogy Conference; 2017
Institución organizadora:
University of Chicago & Institut du Cerveau et la Moelle Epiniere
Resumen:
Many studies on analogical transfer have documented the difficulty of retrieving interdomain analogical sources (Gentner, Rattermann & Forbus, 1993; Gick & Holyoak, 1980; Trench & Minervino, 2015), and a wealth of interventions were carried out to help learners overcome this structural limitation (e.g., Catrambone & Holyoak, 1989; Minervino, Olguín & Trench, 2017; Kurtz & Loewenstein, 2007). The present experiments extend this educationally-relevant line of research by exploring two largely overlooked aspects of real-world analogical retrieval: (1) whether voluntary search represents any advantage over purely spontaneous access, and (2) whether interdomain access is sensitive to the tasks in which analogical search is embedded. While Experiment 1 investigated the effect of voluntary search during argumentation tasks, Experiment 2 assessed an eventual advantage of voluntary search during problem-solving.In Experiment 1, the base analog was framed between two distracter stories, and presented to participants of two experimental conditions as part of a text-comprehension activity. Such story told that after the US and the USSR agreed to discontinue the production of nuclear weapons, the existing ones were not destroyed but kept in arsenals of both countries, with the consequence that a mysterious disappearance of two warheads from one of the arsenals was followed by a spread of radiation that caused severe consequences. After a short break, participants in the voluntary search condition received an explanation about the usefulness of analogy in argumentation, illustrated with two examples. Upon reading such materials, they received a superficially dissimilar target situation stating that a dangerous illness had just been eradicated, and that scientists were debating on whether to destroy the last samples of the virus or to keep them for research purposes. Participants in this condition were asked to argue against keeping the samples by drawing analogies to analogous situations. In contrast to this condition, participants in the spontaneous retrieval condition were asked to argue against the convenience of keeping the samples, but having received neither an instruction about the usefulness of analogies in argumentation nor an indication to base their arguments on analogous cases. Participants' responses to a post-task retrieval questionnaire revealed that the indication to look for analogous cases increased the probability of retrieving an interdomain base analog from memory.By exerting a similar manipulation, Experiment 2 assessed whether a voluntary search for analogs helps participants access a distant source analog during problem-solving activities. The first phase of the procedure was similar to that of Experiment 1, with the difference that the missiles story was replaced by Gick & Holyoak's (1980) Military Problem. After a short break, participants in the voluntary search condition received an instructional material about the usefulness of analogy for solving novel problems, illustrated by two examples. Upon reading these materials, they were asked to solve Dunker's (1945) Radiation Problem by trying to recall analogous situations. Participants in the spontaneous retrieval condition received neither an instruction on the use of analogies in problem-solving nor a hint to look for analogous situations. In contrast with Experiment 1, no differences were found between the voluntary and the spontaneous conditions, possibly due to a floor effect (see Figure 1). We interpret the uneven effectiveness of voluntary search obtained across experiments in terms of two key mismatches between argumentation and problem-solving pragmatics: a higher propensity of problem-solving tasks to initiate a spontaneous search for analogous situations, and the fact that while argumentators start-off with a "complete" representation of the target situation (see O'Keefe & Costello, 2008 for an algorithm built upon this assumption), problem-solvers take as input target representations that are usually incomplete, and that become fully articulated only after the source has provided a suitable solution.