Abstract
The dominant computational models of analogical thinking implicitly assume that the cognitive system searches long-term memory based on cues that are continuously extracted from the current contents of working memory. The studies reviewed in the present chapter shed light on a basic question grossly overlooked in the literature: Can access to distant analogs be enhanced by deliberately attempting to identify analogous sources? As in a Russian doll, a positive answer to this question would lead to another overlooked aspect of analogical thinking: whether analogical search works uniformly irrespective of the overarching activity in which the search is embedded. The core segment of the present chapter reviews a recent series of studies from our laboratory, which show that the potential of deliberate search to increase distant retrievals is strongest during argumentation activities, moderate during hypothesis-generation, and null during problem-solving. We advance some tentative conjectures about the uneven effectiveness of voluntary search across these educationally relevant activities, and argue for the need of more knowledge-intensive target elaborations.
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Notes
- 1.
At first sight, our prompting manipulation might appear to be highly related to Gick and Holyoak’s (1980) contrast between participants who solved the radiation problem before vs. after a hint to consider the stories read during a previous phase of their procedure. Despite this seeming commonality, the psychological constraints for capitalizing on such hint contrast sharply with those involved in our prompt to “think of analogous situations.” As opposed to the latter case, in which the reasoner would need to probe the whole of LTM for potential matches, Gick and Holyoak’s episodic reference to their learning set allows the reasoner to sequentially match the target against each of only three candidate situations, thus reducing an otherwise prohibitive computation to a much more manageable set.
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Trench, M., Minervino, R.A. (2020). Boosting Retrieval via Deliberate Search. In: Distant Connections: The Memory Basis of Creative Analogy. SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52545-3_6
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