The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science

by Dedre Gentner (Editor)

Analogy has been the focus of extensive research in cognitive science over the past two decades. Through analogy, novel situations and problems can be understood in terms of familiar ones. Indeed, a case can be made for analogical processing as the very core of cognition. This is the first book to span the full range of disciplines concerned with analogy. Its contributors represent cognitive, developmental, and comparative psychology; neuroscience; artificial intelligence; linguistics; and philosophy. The book is divided into three parts. The first part describes computational models of analogy as well as their relation to computational models of other cognitive processes. The second part addresses the role of analogy in a wide range of cognitive tasks, such as forming complex cognitive structures, conveying emotion, making decisions, and solving problems. The third part looks at the development of analogy in children and the possible use of analogy in nonhuman primates. Contributors
Miriam Bassok, Consuelo B. Boronat, Brian Bowdle, Fintan Costello, Kevin Dunbar, Gilles Fauconnier, Kenneth D. Forbus, Dedre Gentner, Usha Goswami, Brett Gray, Graeme S. Halford, Douglas Hofstadter, Keith J. Holyoak, John E. Hummel, Mark T. Keane, Boicho N. Kokinov, Arthur B. Markman, C. Page Moreau, David L. Oden, Alexander A. Petrov, Steven Phillips, David Premack, Cameron Shelley, Paul Thagard, Roger K.R. Thompson, William H. Wilson, Phillip Wolff

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Education

541 pages, Paperback

First published February 19, 2001

Reviews

[Douglas Summers-Stay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is something I read for work. It covers various theories of how the brain discovers and makes use of analogies. Here are a few things I learned from the book:
Babies as young as 1 and 2 years old can form analogies between physical situations to solve problems.
When you have two nouns together, like "bed pencil" the first acts as a sort of adjective modifying the second. But what attributes of "bed" are retained, and what attributes of pencil? Is it a pencil used at the bedside? A pencil used as a bed by a tiny person? A pencil used for tracing patterns on bedsheets? What makes one more plausible than another? Which relations between objects tend to be chosen? They gathered statistics answering such questions.
Most of these methods assume a pre-existing structure of explicit relations between objects that are mapped onto each other in analogy. But analogies in word vectors work very differently than that, so I think about how each of the solutions would be implemented in the system I'm building.