Analogy Generation in Science Experts and Novices
| Autor: | Julie C. Libarkin, Micah B. Goldwater, Nicole LaDue, Dedre Gentner |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
Cognitive science
Event (computing) Cognitive Neuroscience media_common.quotation_subject 05 social sciences 050301 education Analogy Experimental and Cognitive Psychology 050105 experimental psychology Task (project management) Domain (software engineering) Naturalistic observation Artificial Intelligence Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Causal reasoning Set (psychology) Function (engineering) Psychology 0503 education Problem Solving media_common |
| Zdroj: | Cognitive Science. 45 |
| ISSN: | 1551-6709 0364-0213 |
| DOI: | 10.1111/cogs.13036 |
| Popis: | There is a critical inconsistency in the literature on analogical retrieval. On the one hand, a vast set of laboratory studies has found that people often fail to retrieve past experiences that share deep relational commonalities, even when they would be useful for reasoning about a current problem. On the other hand, historical studies and naturalistic research show clear evidence of remindings based on deep relational commonalities. Here, we examine a possible explanation for this inconsistency-namely, that remindings based on relational principles increase as a function of expertise. To test this claim, we devised a simple analogy-generation task that can be administered across a wide range of expertise. We presented common events as the bases from which to generate analogies. Although the events themselves were unrelated to geoscience, we found that when the event was explainable in terms of a causal principle that is prominent in geoscience, expert geoscientists were likely to spontaneously produce analogies from geoscience that relied on the same principle. Further, for these examples, prompts to produce causal analogies increased their frequency among nonscientists and scientists from another domain, but not among expert geoscientists (whose spontaneous causal retrieval levels were already high). In contrast, when the example was best explained by a principle outside of geoscience, all groups required prompting to produce substantial numbers of analogies based on causal principles. Overall, this pattern suggests that the spontaneous use of causal principles is characteristic of experts. We suggest that expert scientists adopt habitual patterns of encoding according to the key relational principles in their domain, and that this contributes to their propensity to spontaneously retrieve relational matches. We discuss implications for the nature of expertise and for science instruction and assessment. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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