Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The standard approach posits that analogical inferences aregenerated by copying unmapped base relations, substitutingbase entities by their corresponding target ones, and generatingslots for unmapped base entities. Contra this account, resultsfrom Experiment 1 revealed that analogical inferences seldominclude relations that resemble the base relation from whichthey were derived. Most of the inferences, however, could becategorized as exemplars of a schema-governed categorycapable of characterizing the base information to be projected.To gather further precision about the criteria that guide inferencegeneration, in Experiment 2 we showed that analogicalinferences tend to match the base information from which theyare derived in values of salient dimensions of the relationalcategory to which they belonged. Our results suggest that therelational constructs employed in modeling analogical inferenceshould move beyond one-term multiplace predicates so as toinclude more complex relational structures.