Spontaneous and Voluntary Analogical Retrieval During Problem-Solving and Hypothesis Generation

DIAZ, M. V. ; RIVAS, L. E. ; TRENCH, M.; MINERVINO, R. A.

Conferencia; 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Developing a Mind: Learning in Humans, Animals, and Machines.; 2020

Cognitive Science Society

Theoretical models of analogical retrieval implicitly assumethat the cognitive system continuously scans long-term memorybased on the contents of working memory (WM). Experiment 1revealed that when a target analog is presented in the context ofa problem-solving activity, a prompt to search for analogoussituations adds nothing over-and-above the probabilities ofbeing spontaneously reminded of an analogous problem.More exploratory in nature, Experiment 2 presents the firstexperimental evidence of analogical retrieval during hypothesisgeneration. Our prompt to search for analogous phenomenaincreased access to distant analogs, suggesting that hypothesisgenerationdoes not reliably elicit a search for analogousphenomena. Results suggest that a search for analogous casesis not automatically triggered by the contents of WM, and thatthe nature of the tasks in which the analogs are embeddeddetermines whether a search for analogs will be initiated.