Analogical Inference in Automatic Interpretation
Samuel B. Day, Dedre Gentner · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2003
We present findings suggesting that analogical inference can play a role in the fundamental processes involved in automatic comprehension and interpretation.Participants were found to use information from a prior relationally similar example in understanding the content of a currently encoded example.Further, in doing so they were sensitive to structural mappings between the two instances, ruling out explanations based solely on more general kinds of activation and application.Reading speed measures were used to demonstrate that these inferences were taking place during encoding rather than at later retrieval.These findings support the integration of sophisticated processes such as analogical mapping in a wide range of cognitive functions.