Topic: Structure mapping

Metaphor is a pervasive phenomenon in language and cognition. To date, the vast majority of psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on noun-noun metaphors of the form An X is a Y (e.g., My job is a jail). Yet there is evidence that verb metaphor (e.g., I sailed through my exams) is more common. Despite this, comparatively little work has examined how verb metaphors are processed. In this talk, I will propose a novel account for verb metaphor comprehension: verb metaphors are understood in the same way that analogies are—as comparisons processed via structure-mapping. I will discuss t

Building conceptual abstractions from sensory information and then reasoning about them is central to human intelligence. Abstract reasoning both relies on, and is facilitated by, our ability to make analogies about concepts from known domains to novel domains. Structure Mapping Theory of human analogical reasoning posits that analogical mappings rely on (higher-order) relations and not on the sensory content of the domain. This enables humans to reason systematically about novel domains, a problem with which machine learning (ML) models tend to struggle. We introduce a two-stage neural net fr

Human cognitive abilities seem qualitatively different from the cognitive abilities of other primates, a difference Penn, Holyoak, and Povinelli (2008) attribute to role-based relational reasoning—inferences and generalizations based on the relational roles to which objects (and other relations) are bound, rather than just the features of the objects themselves. Role-based relational reasoning depends on the ability to dynamically bind arguments to relational roles. But dynamic binding cannot be sufficient for relational thinking: Some non-human animals solve the dynamic binding problem, at le

Across species, humans are uniquely able to acquire deep relational systems of the kind needed for mathematics, science, and human language. Analogical comparison processes are a major contributor to this ability. Analogical comparison engages a structure-mapping process (Gentner, 1983) that fosters learning in at least three ways: first, it highlights common relational systems and thereby promotes abstraction; second, it promotes inferences from known situations to less familiar situations; and, third, it reveals potentially important differences between examples. In short, structure-mapping

Cognitive architectures are attempts to build larger-scale models of minds. This talk will explore how structure-mapping models of analogical matching, retrieval, and generalization are used in the Companion cognitive architecture. Examples will include modeling conceptual change, learning by reading, and analogical Q/A training.