Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An Indirect Analogical Mapping Model (IMM) is proposed and preliminary tests are described. Most extant models of analogical mapping enumerate explicit units to represent all possible correspondences between elements in the source and target analogs. IMM is designed to conform to more reasonable assumptions about the representation of propositions in human memory. It computes analogical mappings indirectly -- as a form of guided retrieval -- and without the use of explicit mapping units. IMM's behavior is shown to meet each of Holyoak and Thagard's (1989) computational constraints on analogical mapping. For their constraint of pragmatic centrality, I M M yields more intuitive mappings than does Holyoak and Thagard's model.