Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

An Emergent Approach To Analogical Inference, Paul Thibodeau, Stephen J. Flusberg, Jeremy J. Glick, Daniel A. Sternberg

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

In recent years, a growing number of researchers have proposed that analogy is a core component of human cognition. According to the dominant theoretical viewpoint, analogical reasoning requires a specific suite of cognitive machinery, including explicitly coded symbolic representations and a mapping or binding mechanism that operates over these representations. Here we offer an alternative approach: we find that analogical inference can emerge naturally and spontaneously from a relatively simple, error-driven learning mechanism without the need to posit any additional analogy-specific machinery. The results also parallel findings from the developmental literature on analogy, demonstrating a shift from an initial reliance …