Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Judgments of similarity and soundness are important aspects of human analogical processing. This paper explores how these judgments can be modeled using SME, a simulation of Centner's structure-mapping theory. W e focus on structural evaluation, explicating several principles which psychologically plausible algorithms should follow. W e introduce the Specificity Conjecture, which claims that naturalistic representations include a preponderance of appearance and low-order information. W e demonstrate via computational experiments that this conjecture affects how structural evaluation should be performed, including the choice of normalization technique and how the systematicity preference is implemented.