Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theories of analogical thinking have differed in the roles they ascribe to processing goals as a source of constraint on analogical mappings. W e report an experiment that examines the impact of processing goals on subjects' mappings in (a) a task involving generation of plot extensions for soap opera scripts, and (b) an explicit m o p i n g task based on characters in the scripts. The scripts were written so that the mappings for central characters were four-ways ambiguous. Manipulations of subjects' processing goals influenced their preferred m£q)pings, both in the plot-extension and mapping tasks. In the latter task, goal-irrelevant information contributed to the resolution of m ^ p i n g s that were ambiguous on the basis of goal-relevant information alone. T h e qualitative pattern of results was successfully simulated using A C M E , a constraint-satisfaction model of mapping, in which processing goals are assumed to control an inhibitory process of selective attention. Processing goals attenuate the activation level of goal-irrelevant information, reducing or even eliminating its impact on mapping decisions.