Previous experiments have shown that a comparison of two written narratives highlights their shared relational structure, which in turn facilitates the retrieval of analogous narratives from the past (e.g., Gentner, Loewenstein, Thompson, & Forbus, 2009). However, analogical retrieval occurs across domains that appear more conceptually distant than merely different narratives, and the deepest analogies use matches in higher-order relational structure. The present study investigated whether comparison can facilitate analogical retrieval of higher-order relations across written narratives and abstract symbolic problems. Participants read stories which became retrieval targets after a delay, cued by either analogous stories or letter-strings. In Experiment 1 we replicated Gentner et al. who used narrative retrieval cues, and also found preliminary evidence for retrieval between narrative and symbolic domains. In Experiment 2 we found clear evidence that a comparison of analogous letter-string problems facilitated the retrieval of source stories with analogous higher-order relations. Experiment 3 replicated the retrieval results of Experiment 2 but with a longer delay between encoding and recall, and a greater number of distractor source stories. These experiments offer support for the schema induction account of analogical retrieval (Gentner et al., 2009) and show that the schemas abstracted from comparison of narratives can be transferred to non-semantic symbolic domains.

Engineering designers practice design-by-analogy (DbA) during concept generation to retrieve knowledge from external sources or memory as inspiration to solve design problems. DbA is a tool for innovation that involves retrieving analogies from a source domain and transferring the knowledge to a target domain. While DbA produces innovative results, designers often come up with analogies by themselves or through serendipitous, random encounters. Computational support systems for searching analogies have been developed to facilitate DbA in systematic design practice. However, many systems have focused on a query-based approach, in which a designer inputs a keyword or a query function and is returned a set of algorithmically determined stimuli. In this presentation, a new analogical retrieval process that leverages a visual interaction technique is introduced. It enables designers to explore a space of analogies, rather than be constrained by what’s retrieved by a query-based algorithm. With an exploration-based DbA tool, designers have the potential to uncover more useful and unexpected inspiration for innovative design solutions.

This talk will focus on the idea that the kind of similarity driving analogical retrieval is determined by the kind of features encoded regarding the source and the target cue situations. Emphasis will be put on educational perspectives in order to show the influence of world semantics on learners’ problem representations and solving strategies, as well as the difficulties arising from semantic incongruence between representations and strategies. Special attention will be given to the recoding of semantically incongruent representations, a crucial step that learners struggle with, in order to illustrate a promising path for going beyond informal strategies.

It is generally acknowledged that analogy is a core mechanism of human cognition, but paradoxically, analogies based on structural similarities would rarely be implemented spontaneously (e.g. without an explicit invitation to compare two representations). The scarcity of deep spontaneous analogies is at odds with the demonstration that familiar concepts from our daily-life are spontaneously used to encode the structure of our experiences. Based on this idea, we will present experimental works highlighting the predominant role of structural similarities in analogical retrieval. The educational stakes lurking behind the tendency to encode the problem’s structures through familiar concepts will also be addressed.