Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An ecological model of human information processing is introduced which characterizes intuition as a state oracle providing information for particular types of situations for which attunements to constraints have been developed. The consequences of this model are examined showing among other things that: for a cognitive task with a fixed problem space difficulty can only be reduced by introducing metaphor, difficulty of translation is minimum for a situationally equivalent metaphor, a situationally equivalent metaphor preserves and reflects extrinsic information about the situation, any situation containing a subcategory isomorphic to a problem situation can be made into a metaphor by supplying instructions, these characteristics can be exploited by an algorithm which chooses a metaphor in such a way that attunements are substituted for problem constraints and instructions are used as an "error term".