Strategies in Analogous Planning Cases
Andrew S. Gordon · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2001
Strategies are abstract patterns of planning behavior that are easily recognized, compared, and used by people in everyday planning situations.In an effort to better understand them as a type of mental knowledge structure, three hundred and seventy-two strategies were identified from ten different planning domains, and each was represented in a preformal manner intended to describe the common characteristics of their instances.In doing this large-scale representation work, two observations were made with significance to current theories of analogical reasoning.First, strategies are portions of the relational structure shared by analogous planning cases.Second, representations of strategies include propositions about the reasoning processes of the agent employing them.We propose that a theoretical understanding of analogical reasoning allows us to use strategies as an investigative lens to view the mental models that people have of others and of themselves.