Unconscious Analogical Mapping

Unconscious Analogical Mapping? Penka Hristova (phristova@cogs.nbu.bg) Central and East European Center for Cognitive Science, Department of Cognitive Science and Psychology, New Bulgarian University, 21 Montevideo Street Sofia 1618, Bulgaria participants’ awareness of the primed analogies was not measured in any way. Schunn and Dunbar (1996) also demonstrated priming of specific episodes and argued that subjects were not aware that they were making analogies. The role of analogy, however, was not well controlled in this particular study. It is not clear whether participants solved better the target problem because of priming of useful relevant past knowledge or because of the specific analogy that they were able to draw between the primed and the target episode. Kokinov and Yoveva (1996) have shown that presenting a seemingly irrelevant picture somewhere in the environment may prime the use of some concepts during the problem solving process, although participants reported to be unaware of any relation between the contextual picture and the target task. As in the previous two studies described in this paragraph, this study fails to describe unambiguously whether participants’ problem solving was facilitated by priming of a relevant source for analogy-making or by just priming of a useful concept or of a useful relation. Spellman, Holyoak, and Morrison (2001) have demonstrated relational priming but only under specific conditions – when participants were explicitly instructed to attend to the relations between the prime and the target pair of related words. Although the explicit instructions indicate a conscious rather than an automatic phenomenon, the authors argued that the delay of 400 ms between the prime and the target pair is too short for a strategic processing in the lexical decision task (LDT) that they had used, which is considered evidence for some degree of automaticity of the phenomenon. That is why the authors argued for a mixed automatic/strategic nature of the analogical priming found in their study. Later on a number of linguistic studies found evidence for relational priming with a sensicality task (a task in which participants indicate whether the two words in a pair make sense as a phrase (Gagne, 2001, 2002; Gagne et al., 2005; Estes, 2003; Estes and Jones, 2006)). Participants were not explicitly instructed that the same relation could be held between two subsequent pairs. Thus, although the inter-stimulus interval (i.e. the time between the prime and the target pair) was usually 1s, the fact that relational priming was obtained without specific and explicit instruction clusters these studies with the ones that may indicate the existence of some automatic processing. Still, the sensicality task itself definitely draws the attention toward the relations between the words in a pair and thus ruins the unintentionality of the process. Thus, overall, there is still no clear evidence for the automatic nature of relational priming, which in turn casts doubts on the possibility for an automatic analogical Abstract The paper explores the possibility for unconscious analogy- making. The first experiment demonstrates that people may see different analogies when different relations are unconsciously “highlighted” in the base. The second experiment demonstrates that people unintentionally and unconsciously start to establish a mapping between two simple structures. Various points of view about analogy- making are discussed in light of these findings. Keywords: analogy; unconscious; relational priming Introduction One way of thinking about analogy-making is that it is “the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition” (Hofstater, 2001). Indeed, many researchers in the field adopt this view (Gentner, D., Holyoak, K., Kokinov, B., 2001). Analogy is considered to be a fundamental human ability that takes part in a number of automatic cognitive processes such as perception (Hofstadter, 1995; Mitchell, 1993; French, 1995; Petkov, Kiryazov, Grinberg, Kokinov, 2007), judgment (Kokinov, Hristova, Petkov, 2004; Hristova, Kokinov, 2006), decision-making (Markman & Moreau, 2001; Petkov, 2006), categorization (Medin, Goldstone, Gentner, 1993), memory (Kokinov & Petrov, 2001), etc. If analogy- making is so basic, it should at least partially be an automatic cognitive process (Kokinov, 1998). Finally, the interaction between top-down (i.e., conscious) processing and bottom-up (i.e., unconscious) processing was considered to be the key to analogy-making (Hofstadter, 1995; Mitchell, 1993; French, 1995; Kokinov & Petrov, 2001; Leech, Mareschal and Cooper, 2008). Another way of thinking about analogy is that it is a complex cognitive activity that requires mapping between complex knowledge structures that should be integrated and maintained in the working memory until processed and that could only be sequentially processed in small pieces (Hummel & Holyoak, 1997; Cho, Holyoak and Cannon, 2007). Recent neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that relational integration and analogy-making involve frontal brain areas (Bunge, Wendelken, Badre, Wagner, 2005; Christoff, Prabhakaran, Dorfman, Zhao, Kroger., Holyoak, 2001; Green, Fugelsang, Kraemer, Shamosh, Dunbar, 2006; Luo, Perry , Peng, Jin, Xu, Ding, 2003) , which are typically considered to process thoughts we are aware of (Smith, Keramatian, Smallwood, Schooler, Luus, & Christoff, 2006) There are a few attempts to demonstrate implicit analogy making through priming of analogical base. Kokinov (1990) demonstrated that priming of a specific episode may increase the likelihood of the corresponding analogies, but