Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Deduction, induction and analogy are considered as slightly different manifestations of one and the same reasoning process. A model of this reasoning process called associative memory-based reasoning is proposed. A computer simulation demonstrates that deduction, induction and analogy in problem solving could be performed by a single mechanism which combines the neural network approach with symbol level processing. Psychological experiments on priming effects in problem solving tasks have been carried out in order to test the hypothesis about the uniformity of human reasoning. In particular it has been shown that there are priming effects in all three cases (deduction, induction and analogy) and these priming effects decrease in the course of time which corresponds to the model's predictions based on the retrieval mechanism. The computer simulation demonstrates the same type of priming effects as observed in the psychological experiments.