Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One of the central problems in analogical mapping is overcoming the ambiguities which can occur when matching up corresponding concepts in two domains of knowledge; specifically, to ensure that one-to-many and many-to-one matches are resolved to be one-to-one matches. Various analogy theories have attempted to deal with these problems by maintaining that analogical matching is constrained in various ways. For example, that only predicates of the same structural-type are matched, that primacy is given to matches that are similar or identical, and that a match which comes before an alternative match is preferred. Two experiments are reported, involving an attributemapping problem, which isolate the effects of similarity and order. The first shows that the semantic similarity of predicates in the two domains has a facilitating effect on analogical mapping when other constraints are held constant. The second experiment shows that analogical mapping is sensitive to the order in which matches are made. The implications of these results for current computational models of analogy are discussed, with a special emphasis on the consequences that order effects have for connectionist models.