Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One of the most frequently mentioned sources of scientific hypotheses is analogy. Despite attractiveness of this mechanism of discovery, there has been but a small success in demonstrating that people actually use analogies while solving problems. The study reported below attempted to foster analogical U-ansfer in a scientific discovery task. Subjects worked on two problems that had the same type of underlying mechanism. On day 1, subjects discovered the mechanism that controls virus reproduction. On day 2, subjects returned to work on a problem in molecular genetics that had a similar underlying mechanism. The results showed that experience at discovering the virus mechanism did facilitate performance on the molecular genetics task. However, the verbal protocols do not indicate that subjects analogically mapped knowledge from the virus to the genetics domain. Rather, experience with the virus problem appeared to prime memory. It is argued that analogical mapping can be used flexibly in scientific discovery contexts and that primed knowledge structures can also provide access to relevant information when analogical mapping fails.