Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We applied eye tracking and semantically rich four-term analogies with a broad range of distractor types to investigate strategies of analogical reasoning. We adopted the operationalization of strategies proposed in previous eye-tracking studies and introduced an alternative, more fine-grained method of presenting gaze dynamics across a trial in a four-term analogy (A:B::C:D). Our analysis of fixations and transitions between Areas of Interest provided support for existing research findings, suggesting that the primary and most effective strategy when solving four-term analogies is the so-called projection-first strategy, which focuses on the source-domain relation and its generalization to the target domain.