Topic: mental representation

Following the seminal structure mapping theory by Dedre Gentner, the process of mapping the corresponding structures of relations defining two analogs has been understood as a key component of analogy making. However, not without a merit, in recent years some semantic, pragmatic, and perceptual aspects of analogy mapping attracted primary attention of analogy researchers. For almost a decade, our team have been re-focusing on relational structure mapping, investigating its potential mechanisms across various analogy tasks, both abstract (semantically-lean) and more concrete (semantically-rich)

Face detection is an initial step of many social interactions involving a comparison between a visual input and a mental representation of faces, built from previous experience. Whilst emotional state was found to affect the way humans attend to faces, little research has explored the effects of emotions on the mental representation of faces. Here, we examined the specific perceptual modulation of geometric properties of the mental representations associated with state anxiety and state depression on face detection, and to compare their emotional expression. To this end, we used an adaptation

Analogical reasoning is one of the most complex cognitive functions in humans that allows abstract thinking, high-level reasoning, and learning. Based on analogical reasoning, one can extract an abstract and general concept (i.e., an analogy schema) from a familiar situation and apply it to a new context or domain (i.e., analogy transfer). These processes allow us to solve problems we never encountered before and generate new ideas. However, the place of analogy transfer in problem solving mechanisms is unclear. This presentation will describe several experiments with three main findings. Firs