Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans appear to often solve problems in a new domain by transferring their expertise from a more familiar domain. However, making such cross-domain analogies is hard and often requires abstractions common to the source and target domains. Recent work in case-based design suggests that generic mechanisms are one type of abstractions used by designers. However, one important yet unexplored issue is where these generic mechanisms come from. W e hypothesize that they are acquired incrementally from problem-solving experiences in familiar domains by generalization over patterns of regularity. Three important issues in generalization from experiences are what to generalize from an experience, how far to generalize, and what methods to use. In this paper, we show that mental models in a familiar domain provide the content, and together with the problem-solving context in which learning occurs, also provide the constraints for learning generic mechanisms from design experiences. In particular, we show how the model-based learning method integrated with similarity-based learning addresses the issues in generalization from experiences.