Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We report two experiments which assessed the psychological validity of the Copycat framework for analogy, which proposes that analogy is a process of creating a representation. Experiment 1 presented subjects with two letter string analogies: "If abc is changed to abd how would kji be changed in the same way?", and the same statement but with mrrjjj as the string to be changed. Each subject attempted to solve both analogies and order of presentation was varied. The predictions of Copycat very closely matched the performance of human subjects on the first analogy people solved. However, the second analogy task showed substantial asymmetrical transfer effects that the model does not directly predict. Substantially greater transfer was observed from the mrrjjj analogy, for which it is hard to produce a highly structured representation, to the easier to represent kji analogy, than vice-versa. In Experiment 2 the first part of the statement of the problem was "If aabbcc is changed to aabbcd...". In this case kji becomes harder to represent than mrrjjj. As predicted, this version yielded more transfer from kji to mrrjjj than the reverse. In both experiments transfer was asymmetrically with greater transfer from less structured to more structured problems than the reverse. Overall the study supported Copycat's contention that representation is a vital component for understanding analogical processors.