Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People use analogies for many cognitive purposes such asbuilding mental models, making inspired guesses, andextracting relational structure. Here we examine whether andhow analogies may have more direct influence on knowledge:Do people treat analogies as probabilistically trueexplanations for uncertain propositions?We report an experiment that explores how a suggestedanalogy can influence people’s confidence in inferences.Participants made predictions while simultaneouslyevaluating a suggested analogy and observed evidence. In twoconditions, the evidence is either consistent with or in conflictwith propositions based on the suggested analogy. Weanalyze the responses statistically and in a psychologicallyplausible Bayesian network model. We find that analogies areused for more than just generating candidate inferences. Theyact as probabilistic truths that affect the integration ofevidence and confidence in both the target and sourcedomains. People readily treat analogies not as a one-wayprojection from source to target, but as a mutually informativeconnection.