Distant Connections: The Memory Basis of Creative Analogy

Analogical thinking lies at the core of human cognition, pervading from the most mundane to the most extraordinary forms of creativity. By connecting poorly understood phenomena to learned situations whose structure is well articulated, it allows reasoners to expand the boundaries of their knowledge. 

The first part of the book begins by fleshing out the debate around whether our cognitive system is well-suited for creative analogizing, and ends by reviewing a series of studies that were designed to decide between the experimental and the naturalistic accounts. The studies confirm the psychological reality of the surface bias revealed by most experimental studies, thus claiming for realistic solutions to the problem of inert knowledge.

The second part of the book delves into cognitive interventions, while maintaining an emphasis on the interplay between psychological modeling and instructional applications. It begins by reviewing the first generation of instructional interventions aimed at improving the later retrievability of educational contents by highlighting their abstract structure. Subsequent chapters discuss the most realistic avenues for devising easily-executable and widely-applicable ways of enhancing access to stored knowledge that would otherwise remain inert. The authors review results from studies from both others and their own lab that speak of the promise of these approaches.

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• Creative Analogy
• Structural vs. surface similarity
• "Karla the Hawk"
• MAC-FAC
• ARCS
• LISA
• Naturalistic Tradition
• The case-based reasoning approach
• The in vivo/in vitro approach
• The production paradigm
• Boosting retrieval via deliberate search
• Boosting retrieval via target elaborations
• Target comparison during negotiation
• Target comparison during problem-solving
• computational social sciences

• Psychology Department, IPEHCS, CONICET- Universidad del Comahue, Bariloche, Argentina

  Máximo Trench

• National Scientific and Technical Research Council, IPEHCS, CONICET-Universidad del Comahue, Cipolletti, Argentina

  Ricardo A. Minervino

Máximo Trench is professor of psychology at the National University of Comahue and Adjunct Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research. He has taught graduate-level courses of cognitive processes at several Masters and Ph.D. programs (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Universidad de Palermo, FLACSO and UCES), and has served as visiting scholar at Indiana University-Bloomington with support from the Fulbright Commission and the Argentine Ministry of Education. His research is conducted both at the Bariloche campus of the University of Comahue and at the Patagonic Institute for Studies in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. His interests concentrate on the mechanisms underlying the generation and interpretation of analogical comparisons, as they take place during educationally-relevant activities such as learning, problem solving, argumentation, hypothesis generation, and comprehension. His intra and extramural projectsaim at developing cognitive interventions to increase access to analogically related learning that would otherwise remain inert in long-term memory.

Ricardo A. Minervino is professor of cognitive psychology at the National University of Comahue and Independent Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina. He has taught graduate-level courses of thinking and creativity in several Masters and Ph.D. programs (Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Universidad Nacional de la Plata, and FLACSO). His research is conducted both at the School of Education of the University of Comahue and at the Patagonic Institute for Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. His current projects are interested in determining the mechanisms that are involved in the production of a particular kind of analogies—those that are framed by schema-governed categories—, and the role that different pragmaticsplay in these processes. His broader interests extend to the role of conceptual metaphors in cognition and to the role of analogies in creativity.

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