Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Analogy is one of the primary mechanisms of cognition, particularly in problem-solving and learning. However, people do not use analogies very effectively. I postulate seven separate processes for analogy that could be responsible for weak analogical reasoning and test those processes independently. The results suggest that performance on analysis of the problem and performance on confirmation of the appropriateness of the analogy both might be suspect in analogical deficits.