Abstract
Traditional experimental studies of analogical retrieval converged in documenting the centrality of superficial similarities during the retrieval of analogous situations from long-term memory. The present Chapter reviews a more recent generation of observational studies which began to analyze the spontaneous analogies produced by professionals of several disciplines as they work in their areas of expertise. The analogies generated within scientific domains such as Biology, Psychology, or Geology revealed a close thematic connection between the target analogs and the retrieved sources, with distant analogizing being mostly restricted to the goal of illustrating ideas to others. However, the productive analogies generated by journalists, economists, educators, and developers of industrial products were drawn to the same domain as the target in a small proportion of the cases, thus suggesting that the retrieval of analogous cases is not invariably constrained by superficial similarity. After reviewing the use of analogies within this varied array of professional activities, we succinctly describe the computer models that were engineered to simulate this pattern of analogical retrieval.
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Trench, M., Minervino, R.A. (2020). The Naturalistic Tradition. In: Distant Connections: The Memory Basis of Creative Analogy. SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52545-3_3
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