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The Fate of Irrelevant Information in Analogical Mapping

The Fate of Irrelevant Information in Analogical Mapping C. Hunt Stilwell (stilwell@psy.utexas.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Mezes Hall 330 Austin, TX 78712 Arthur B. Markman (markman@psy.utexas.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Mezes Hall 330 Austin, TX 78712 Abstract Research on analogical mapping has not yet focused on the fate of information about the base and target domains that is not relevant to the correspondence. We suggest that there are two methods for dealing with irrelevant information in analogies. Nonalignable objects are ignored, while irrelevant attributes of alignable differences are packed away using a process that is a long term equivalent to the suppression process observed in the text comprehension literature. We report one study that supports this hypothesis by demonstrating that unpacking irrelevant information interferes with memory for domains involved in a comparison. Introduction Analogical reasoning allows people to compare across domains that might not seem similar on the surface (Gentner, 1983; Holyoak & Thagard, 1995; Keane, Ledgeway, & Duff, 1994). For example, the atom is like the solar system, because something (electrons and planets) revolves around something else (the nucleus and the sun) in each. An open question in analogy research is what happens to the knowledge that is not relevant to this similarity (e.g., electrons are very small and planets are very large)? Most research on comparisons and analogies has focused only on the relevant information. However, the fate of irrelevant information such as the size of the orbiting object in the above example can have important implications for models of analogy and comparisons in general. In order to place this issue in context, we first discuss the structural alignment process. We then propose a mechanism for dealing with irrelevant information, called packing , and compare it to a similar mechanism in language comprehension. Finally, we report an experiment testing this mechanism. Irrelevant information in analogy The structural alignment process is used to compare two domains in an analogy. The process operates over structured representations in which the relations between objects are explicit. This leads to two types of information that can be used in the analogy: relational information and object information. Relational information is simply information about the relations between objects, while object information includes the relations the object participates in and the attributes of the object. In an analogy, the two domains are aligned so that their common relational structures are placed in correspondence, and this leads to relational information becoming focal (Markman & Gentner, 1997). In structural alignment’s original formulation, only relational information was used in the comparison of domains (Gentner, 1983, 1989). However, when the theory was extended to ordinary similarity comparisons (Gentner & Markman, 1997; Markman & Gentner, 1993; Medin, Goldstone, & Gentner, 1993), object attribute information became relevant. In a similarity comparison, if the object match is better than the relational match, then it will be preferred. There is also evidence that attribute information influences analogical comparisons. For example, analogs are easier to retrieve if they share attribute similarity to the target than when they share only relational similarity (Gentner, Rattermann, & Forbus, 1993). The fact that attribute information is available in analogical comparisons raises an important question: How does structural alignment deal with attribute information in analogies, where it is not relevant? One way in that superfluous attribute information might adversely affect the comparison process is by taxing working memory. Recently the role of working memory in analogy has become a topic of study (Hummel & Holyoak, 1997; Waltz, et al., 2000). One finding from this work is that straining working memory hinders the discovery of common relational structures. This is because relational matches take up more working memory capacity than do surface (attribute) matches. Thus anything that decreases the working memory load (e.g., making attribute information less available) will facilitate relational comparisons. Structural alignment handles some irrelevant information through the concept of alignability. Alignable objects, or objects that participate in the relational correspondence, are relevant to the comparison. In analogies, these objects are generally alignable differences , i.e., nonidentical objects that are