Relations as transformations: Implications for analogical reasoning

Abstract

We present two experiments assessing whether the size of a transformation instantiating a relation between two states of the world (e.g., shrinks) is a performance factor affecting analogical reasoning. The first experiment finds evidence of transformation size as a significant factor in adolescent analogical problem solving while the second experiment finds a similar effect on adult analogical reasoning using a markedly different analogical completion paradigm. The results are interpreted as providing evidence for the more general framework that cognitive representations of relations are best understood as mental transformations.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by an ESRC (UK) studentship, MRC NIA grant G0400341, and European Commission grant NEST-29088 (ANALOGY).

Notes

¹ A one-tailed χ² test was used here and in the following case as the experimental hypothesis was unidirectional. Such hypotheses can be formulated and tested for χ² when there is a single degree of freedom (Howell, 1997).

² Word frequency was taken from the British National Corpus, a balanced corpus of over 100,000,000 spoken and written words representing a balanced wide range of British English.

³ Latent semantic analysis is an objective measurement of semantic relatedness extracted from the text of a given corpus.