Analogical Learning and Case-based Instruction
Sponsor: Cognitive Science Division, Office of Naval Research
Principal Investigators: Dedre Gentner, Kenneth D. Forbus
Project Summary: Our research program combines psychological and computational research to explore the role of analogy and similarity in learning and reasoning from examples.
This issue is central to understanding how to improve education and training, in which examples are used ubiquitously but not always effectively. Our research suggests ways to maximize the learning potential of examples in instruction. The psychological principles we develop should also provide guidance for creating better case-based software, which could be used to provide performance support on ships and to facilitate training and decision-making.
The role of analogy and similarity in learning and reasoning from examples is central to understanding the nature of human cognition. We believe that comparison lies at the heart of cognition. We are exploring this conjecture via a cognitive architecture that focuses on learning and conceptual change (Forbus & Gentner, 1991;1997). In our model, structure-mapping is integral to learning and reasoning. It underlies category assignment, since exemplars are compared with structural descriptions of the category norm and are thereby assigned to categories. It underlies the formation of categories through the comparison of exemplars with one another to derive a common abstraction. It underlies inference from categories through candidate inferences drawn via comparisons of the category norm with the instance at hand. The linkages among these phenomena help constrain the similarity-based cognitive architecture, which we then test and refine through a combination of psychological and computational experimentation.
Some recent papers:
Yan, J. and Forbus, K. (2004). Similarity-based qualitative simulation: A preliminary report. Proceedings of the 18th International Qualitative Reasoning Workshop, Evanston, Illinois, USA, August.
Gentner, D. (2003). Why we're so smart. In D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp.195-235). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gentner, D., Loewenstein, J., Thompson, L. (2003). Learning and Transfer: A general role for analogical encoding. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(2), 393-408.
Yan, J., Forbus, K., and Gentner, D. (2003). A theory of rerepresentation in analogical matching. Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.