Research
Analogical Reasoning
Analogy is a basic human reasoning process used in science, literature, art, education, and politics. Analogy can be used to make predictions, provide explanations, and restructure our knowledge. Analogy is also used to influence public opinion, fight battles, win wars, start and finish relationships, and advertise laundry detergent. Analogies are also ubiquitous in science. Because analogy use is so common, and such an essential part of human existence, there has been much research in Cognitive Science on the nature of analogy -- many experiments have been conducted and computational models proposed.
Over the past twenty years, we have been investigating analogy in multiple contexts ranging from experiments on analogical reasoning in the cognitive lab, scientists using analogies at their lab meetings, analyses of politicians using analogies at political meetings to our more recent research on analogy where we have investigated the brain-based mechanisms underlying the use of analogy and the roles of categorization and abstract relations in analogical thinking. Using brain scanning techniques such as fMRI, we have found regions of the brain involved in abstract analogical thinking (Frontopolar regions) that are separate from the memory requirements of a task. Furthermore, we have developed an analogical reasoning task that gives a direct measure of abstraction. We are conducting fMRI investigations of the neural bases of analogical thinking that make it possible to determine how memory is searched during analogy generation. This work has many implications for the uses of analogy in the classroom as it has allowed us to discover how categorization and feature mapping drive the analogical reasoning process to completion.