Structure‐Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy*

Gentner, Dedre

doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0702_3

Cited by 3,598 publications

(1,456 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…E. Smith, 1989), and people use this rule (e.g., items that bear the same name have features in common) to interpret unrelated attributes. The idea that inductive judgments consist of two separate processes is consistent with a wide range of findings in cognitive psychology, including analogy (Clement & Gentner, 1991;Forbus, Gentner, & Law, 1995;Gentner, 1983;Gentner & Markman, 1997;Gentner, Rattermann, & Forbus, 1993;A. B. Markman & Gentner, 1993), reasoning (Cheng, Holyoak, Nisbett, & Oliver, 1986;Johnson-Laird, 1983;Kahneman & Tversky, 1972, 1973Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, learning English syntax (Pinker, 1991), and problem solving (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981).…”

Section: Many Liberal People Like Ethnic Food Because Jane Is a Libesupporting

confidence: 62%

Labeling Bias and Categorical Induction: Generative Aspects of Category Information.

Yamauchi¹

2005

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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When a person is characterized categorically with a label (e.g., Linda is a feminist), people tend to think that the attributes associated with that person are central and long lasting (S. Gelman & G. D. Heyman, 1999). This bias, which is related to category-based induction and stereotyping, has been thought to arise because a category label (e.g., feminist) activates the dominant properties associated with the representation of the category. This explanation implies that categorical information influences inferential processes mainly by conjuring up main attributes or instances represented in the category. However, the present experiments reveal that this attribute-based explanation of induction does not provide a complete picture of inferential processes. The results from 3 experiments suggest that category information can affect inferences of attributes that are not directly related to the category, suggesting that categories not only activate likely attributes but also help integrate unlikely or even unrelated attributes.One of the core purposes of categories is to integrate information and apply it to future predictions (Anderson, 1990;Rosch, 1978;E. E. Smith, 1994). For example, one forms the category "liberal" by classifying people who have similar political opinions and then uses the category to make an inference, such as predicting the policy that a member of the category advocates. In this regard, categories help bind information and serve as a medium for inferences.How do categories integrate diverse information and license inductive inferences? Main psychological accounts of inductive judgments suggest that two factors-(a) matching attributes between entities and (b) the coverage of premises over a conclusion (hereafter I call these two factors attribute-based similarity)-are the guiding forces of inferences (see Heit, 2000, for a review; Kunda & Thagard, 1996;Osherson, Smith, Wilkie, Lopez, & Shafir, 1990;Osherson, Stern, Wilke, Stob, & Smith, 1991;Rips, 1975;Sloman, 1993;E. R. Smith & Zarate, 1992;Tversky, 1977). According to this view, for example, the conclusion Lions have Disease X, given a premise, Zebras have Disease X, is credible proportional to the extent to which the two entities-zebras and lions-have features in common and the magnitude of an entity in a premise (i.e., zebras) exceeds that of a conclusion (lions; i.e., coverage).This similarity-based account of categorical induction has inspired many areas of cognitive psychology and social cognition and has yielded a rich array of empirical findings that illuminate the relationship between feature-based similarity and category membership

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Section: Many Liberal People Like Ethnic Food Because Jane Is a Libesupporting

confidence: 62%

Labeling Bias and Categorical Induction: Generative Aspects of Category Information.

Yamauchi¹

2005

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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“…Why does seeing the blue and yellow (and purple and orange) spoon side-by-side make more explicit the relation between color and function? Gentner and her colleagues (Gentner, 1983;Gentner & Gunn, 2001;Gentner & Markman, 1994;Gentner & Medina, 1998;Markman & Gentner, 1997 have argued that when attempting to map one event representation onto another, there are multiple strategies that can be invoked. One strategy is to focus on the objects themselves, and to identify whether the object in the first event (e.g., blue spoon) maps onto the object in the second event (e.g., yellow spoon).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In children, comparison has been identified as important to analogical reasoning (Gentner & Namy, 2006;Gentner & Toupin, 1986), detecting relational similarities (Kotovsky & Gentner, 1996), spatial mapping (Loewenstein & Gentner, 2001), and the development of categories (Gentner & Namy, 1999). Finally, cognitive psychologists have investigated the importance of comparison to a number of cognitive functions, including analogy, memory, representational mapping (Gentner, 1983;Gentner & Gunn, 2001;Markman & Gentner, 1997. Together these results firmly establish comparison as an integral part of cognitive function, across the life span.…”

Section: The Role Of Comparison In Forming Categorical Event Represenmentioning

confidence: 94%

Color–function categories that prime infants to use color information in an object individuation task

Wilcox

Woods

Chapa

2008

Cognitive Psychology

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There is evidence for developmental hierarchies in the type of information to which infants attend when reasoning about objects. Investigators have questioned the origin of these hierarchies and how infants come to identify new sources of information when reasoning about objects. The goal of the present experiments was to shed light on this debate by identifying conditions under which infants' sensitivity to color information, which is slow to emerge, could be enhanced in an object individuation task. The outcome of Experiment 1 confirmed and extended previous reports that 9.5-month-olds can be primed, through exposure to events in which the color of an object predicts its function, to attend to color differences in a subsequent individuation task. The outcomes of Experiments 2 to 4 revealed age-related changes in the nature of the representations that support color priming. This is exemplified by three main findings. First, the representations that are formed during the colorfunction events are relatively specific. That is, infants are primed to use the color difference seen in the color-function events to individuate objects in the test events, but not other color differences. Second, 9.5-month-olds can be led to form more abstract event representations, and then generalize to other colors in the test events if they are shown multiple pairs of colors in the color-function events. Third, slightly younger 9-month-olds also can be led to form more inclusive categories with multiple color pairs, but only when they are allowed to directly compare the exemplars in each color pair during the present events. These results shed light on the development of categorization abilities, cognitive mechanisms that support color-function priming, and the kinds of experiences that can increase infants' sensitivity to color information.

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“…Although structure mapping has often been applied to conceptual analogies such as the atom/solar system analogy (Gentner, 1983), there is considerable evidence that the same structural alignment process also occurs during perceptual comparison (Markman & Gentner, 1993bChristie & Gentner, 2010; This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

Section: Comparison and Difference Detectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting anomalous features in complex stimuli: The role of structured comparison.

Kurtz

Gentner

2013

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

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The ability to detect anomalies in perceived stimuli is critical to a broad range of cognitive tasks, yet acquiring this ability often requires lengthy practice. In this research, we asked whether findings from research on analogical comparison can be used to aid in the acquisition of perceptual expertise. Building on findings that comparison can facilitate the detection of differences, the present research addressed two questions: (1) Does having an alignable comparison standard improve performance on a difficult detection task? (2) Can such comparison experience improve subsequent detection performance on single anomalous targets? Across 3 experiments, university undergraduates were asked to find an anomalous bone in drawings of animal skeletons. Target items including an anomaly were presented either alone or with a correct standard. Furthermore, to evaluate the impact of ease of alignment, the correct standard was presented either mirror-reversed (low alignable) or regular (high alignable). Results showed increased accuracy when a comparison standard was present and further gains when the standard was more easily alignable. In Experiment 3, we used a between-subjects design to reveal that advance comparison (as opposed to single-item training) led to improved detection of anomalies in subsequent novel examples presented as isolated targets. We conclude that the availability of a standard and ease of alignment promote encoding and processing. Furthermore, comparison-based learning confers an ongoing advantage even without standards for comparison. Therefore, task performance in application areas requiring detection of nonobvious anomalies can be improved by providing alignable standards next to targets or in advance training.

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Structure‐Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy*

Cited by 3,598 publications

References 14 publications

Labeling Bias and Categorical Induction: Generative Aspects of Category Information.

Labeling Bias and Categorical Induction: Generative Aspects of Category Information.

Color–function categories that prime infants to use color information in an object individuation task

Detecting anomalous features in complex stimuli: The role of structured comparison.

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