Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Popular approaches to modeling analogical reasoning havecaptured a wide range of developmental and cognitivephenomena, but the use of structured symbolicrepresentations makes it difficult to account for the dynamicand context sensitive nature of similarity judgments. Here, theresults of a novel behavioral task are offered as an additionalchallenge for these approaches. Participants were presentedwith a familiar analogy problem (A:B::C:?), but with a twist.Each of the possible completions (D1, D2, D3), could beconsidered valid: There was no unambiguously “correct”answer, but an array of equally good candidates. We find thatparticipants’ recent experience categorizing objects (i.e.,manipulating the salience of the features), systematicallyaffected performance in the ambiguous analogy task. Theresults are consistent with a dynamic, context sensitiveapproach to modeling analogy that continuously updatesfeature weights over the course of experience