Presentation at the Analogy List webinar
Analogy List is a community of researchers working on analogical reasoning. Since the beginning of the pandemic online conferences have been set up on a weekly basis in order to keep the community connected. IDEA team members Katarina Gvozdic and Lucas Raynal were invited to present their work in November 2020.
In their talk "The Structural Anchoring of Spontaneous Analogies" Katarina & Lucas presented that it is generally acknowledged that analogy is a core mechanism of human cognition, but paradoxically, analogies based on structural similarities would rarely be implemented spontaneously (e.g. without an explicit invitation to compare two representations). The scarcity of deep spontaneous analogies is at odds with the demonstration that familiar concepts from our daily-life are spontaneously used to encode the structure of our experiences. Based on this idea, we will present experimental works highlighting the predominant role of structural similarities in analogical retrieval. The educational stakes lurking behind the tendency to encode the problem’s structures through familiar concepts will also be addressed.