Abstract
The initial years of the cognitive approach to analogical thinking witnessed a rapid consensus about the central subprocesses of mapping and inference generation. In contrast, the way reasoning teams up with memory during analogical retrieval remains subject to heated debates. What have we learned about this most critical bottleneck in creative analogizing, and what remains unknown? After analyzing the limitations of behavioral studies of analogical retrieval, we point to the study of individual differences as an overlooked target of empirical investigations: If there are interpersonal differences in the ability to detect deep commonalities, where exactly do they originate? If they are related to the ability to think abstractly—a central component of intelligence—how do proficient encoders manage to calibrate the abstractness of their representations without knowing how distant a past or future analog will be? Taking a broader view, the final section of this chapter draws attention to a handful of poorly understood mechanisms that do not conform to a strict definition of analogical retrieval, but which could nevertheless aid reasoners in generating disant analogies.
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Notes
- 1.
Other individual traits allegedly facilitating distant analogical transfer are field-independence (Antonietti & Gioletta, 1995) and divergent associative thinking, as measured by the remote associates task (Cushen & Wiley, 2018). However, some methodological decisions make these studies look like a test of mapping rather than of retrieval: While the former included a hint to consider the source stories, the second employed a base analog that was thematically related to the tumor problem (the light-bulb story).
- 2.
In constructing our examples, the gradation of generality involved both objects and relations. Even though this criterion renders the task more challenging than simply abstracting entities and contextual features—see, e.g., MAC/FAC simulations—we do this under the assumption that in analogies of realistic complexity, the core relational predicates are seldom identical across analogs.
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Trench, M., Minervino, R.A. (2020). Epilogue: Unanswered Questions and Future Challenges in Creative Analogical Retrieval. In: Distant Connections: The Memory Basis of Creative Analogy. SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52545-3_8
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