UC Merced Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Title Analogical transfer of intentions Publication Date Analogical transfer of intentions (original) (raw)
Related papers
Analogical transfer of intentions
Humans are exceptionally good at inferring the intentions behind particular behavior even when the situation is complex or the context is completely new. In this paper we explore the hypothesis that a kind of analogical transfer from past experience to present situations plays an important role in the process of attributing intentions to ambiguous actions. The participants in our experiment were presented with two stories, the latter containing an ambiguous action. They were asked to evaluate how plausible was that the actor in the second story had a particular intention, either positive, or negative, or neutral. We found that the participants rated higher the plausibility of a negative intention when the preceding story was relationally similar and its actor manifested negative intentions. The attribution of intention to the ambiguous action was not different from that in the control condition when the preceding story was dissimilar or perceptually similar, or when its actor manife...
2013
Analogy is a kind of similarity in which the same system of relations holds across different objects. Analogies thus capture parallels across different situations. When such a common structure is found, then what is known about one situation can be used to infer new information about the other. This chapter describes the processes involved in analogical reasoning, reviews foundational research and recent developments in the field, and proposes new avenues of investigation. analogy, mapping, inference, reasoning, relational structure, structural alignment, relational similarity, structure mapping, metaphor Analogical ability—the ability to perceive like relational structure across different contexts—is a core mechanism of human cognition. The ability to perceive and use purely relational similarity is a major contributor—arguably the major contributor—to our species ’ remarkable mental powers (Gentner,
The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology
2013
Analogy is a kind of similarity in which the same system of relations holds across different objects. Analogies thus capture parallels across different situations. When such a common structure is found, then what is known about one situation can be used to infer new information about the other. This chapter describes the processes involved in analogical reasoning, reviews foundational research and recent developments in the field, and proposes new avenues of investigation.
Psychological Science, 2011
Scientists have long been interested in understanding how language shapes the way people relate to others, yet it remains unclear how formal aspects of language influence person perception. We tested whether the attribution of intentionality to a person is influenced by whether the person's behaviors are described as what the person was doing or as what the person did (imperfective vs. perfective aspect). In three experiments, participants who read what a person was doing showed enhanced accessibility of intention-related concepts and attributed more intentionality to the person, compared with participants who read what the person did. This effect of the imperfective aspect was mediated by a more detailed set of imagined actions from which to infer the person's intentions and was found for both mundane and criminal behaviors. Understanding the possible intentions of others is fundamental to social interaction, and our findings show that verb aspect can profoundly influence this process.
Justification effects on the judgment of analogy
Memory & Cognition, 1999
Many of us share a strong intuition that justification forces us to better understand the situations we face. And there is substantial evidence indicating that this is often the case. However, there is a growing body of research showing that, under certain circumstances, explanation and justification can impair performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. In the present research, the effects of justification on judgment of the soundness of analogies were examined. Subjects judged the quality of the match between pairs of stories with varying degrees of superficial and analogical similarity. Experimental subjects either provided reasons for theirjudgments or wrote recollections of the target stimuli. These subjects rated the match between stimulus pairs as more sound than did control subjects. Also, providing reasons led to poorer discrimination between superficially similar aspects of the stimuli and analogous aspects. Explanations of these findings are proposed, and implications for problem solving and confidence judgment are discussed. We are often called upon to explain or justify our proposed actions (Koehler, 1991), and many of us believe that this process aids our understanding of the situations we face. This belief appears to be well founded. Studies of learning and instruction indicate that students learn more when explaining examples to themselves (Chi,
Remembering Apparent Behavior: A Study of Narrative Mediation
The present experiment systematically investigates the role of narrative templates (Wertsch, 2002) in remembering. To stimulate the construction of a diversity of narratives I used Heider and Simmel’s (1944) celebrated “apparent behavior” film, in which geometric shapes moving around a screen are seen by subjects as agents involved in a kind of story. Which narratives are used, as well as the “strength” subjects used them with, is then compared with what subjects remember and how they remembered it. The relationship is not conceived causally (as if one variable determined or predicted another) but rather as constraints on an agent’s constructive potentials. My analysis involves attending to both general trends found across the sample, as well as the particularities of single cases, especially atypical cases. In other words, I use patterns found at the level of the sample to choose which subjects to attend to in the idiographic analysis. Generalization still moves from single case to general model and back to single case, but the movement is facilitated by analysis at the level of the sample as a whole.
Transfer of Structure-Related and Arbitrary Information in Analogical Reasoning
The Psychological Record, 2001
Analogies can aid learners in understanding a new domain, yet misunderstandings may occur if they are applied too broadly. The present studies examined transfer of two types of information. Participants read analogical source and target stories. The source stories in Experiments 1-3 included two additional sentences that could be transferred to the target. One of the sentences was related to the analogical structure, while the other was more arbitrary. Participants transferred the structure-related information significantly more often than the arbitrary information both when retrieving source stories from memory (Experiment 1) and when having access to them (Experiment 2). Participants in Experiment 3 were explicitly encouraged to consider both types of information for transfer. Results showed the structure-related information was selected as the appropriate transfer sentence. Experiment 4 examined the possibility that reading both types of information in the source stories influenced transfer rates. Some participants received stories with both the structure-related and arbitrary information while others received stories with only one type of information. Again, participants transferred the structure-related information to a greater extent than the arbitrary information. Furthermore, no differences in transfer were found between participants who received both types of information in the source domain versus those who received only one type of information. Overall , the results of the studies provide evidence that learners will preferentially transfer information related to the shared analogical structure. Experiment 1 was conducted as part of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD degree at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1995. I thank my dissertation committee: Marvin Daehler, Chair, Arnold Well, Carole Seal, and John Clement. Experiments 2 and 3 were presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society, June, 2000 in Miami , Florida. I thank Catherine Clement, Marvin Daehler, and Jennifer Yanowitz for their helpful and extensive comments on earlier versions of this article. Special thanks also to Catherine Clement for generously providing copies of materials she generated for her research .
Understanding Intentions: Distinct Processes for Mirroring, Representing, and Conceptualizing
We provide converging evidence from developmental, imaging, and lesion studies that intentions can be processed at three distinct levels: a mirroring level, which infers immediate action goals on the basis of observed actions; a representational level, which is concerned with the psychological-rather than merely behavioral-representation of the mental states that underlie those actions; and a conceptual level, which allows people to reason about the semantic and logical properties of mental states. Together, the representational and conceptual levels form what is currently referred to as the mentalizing system. We argue that although the mirroring and mentalizing systems may work independently of each other, within the mentalizing system, the representational level subserves the conceptual level.
“I didn't want to do it!” The detection of past intentions
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2015
In daily life and in courtrooms, people regularly analyze the minds of others to understand intentions. Specifically, the detection of intentions behind prior events is one of the main issues dealt with in courtrooms. To our knowledge, there are no experimental works focused on the use of memory detection techniques to detect past intentions. This study aims at investigating whether reaction times (RTs) could be used for this purpose, by evaluating the accuracy of the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) in the detection of past intentions. Sixty healthy volunteers took part in the experiment (mean age: 36.5 y; range: 18-55; 30 males). Participants were asked to recall and report information about a meeting with a person that had occurred at least 1 month before. Half of the participants were required to report about an intentional meeting, whereas the other half reported on a chance meeting. Based on the conveyed information, participants performed a tailored aIAT in which they had to categorize real reported information contrasted with counterfeit information. Results demonstrated that RTs can be a useful measure for the detection of past intentions and that aIAT can detect real past intentions with an accuracy of 95%.