The Study On The Result Of The Analogical Reasoning

The research on analogical reasoning is one of the most important aspects of psychology. Its result can not only reveal the cognitive process of human, but also promote the research of other fields, for example, the field of education. At present, we have reaped rich fruits on analogical reasoning, but the researchers neglected the research on the results of analogical reasoning-the relationship between analogical inferences and target representations.The way that analogy alters the representation of target information was investigated in 3 experiments. Participants read information about a target, followed by a potential source analog. Participants later completed a recognition test in which some of the sentences were old, some novel, and some analogical inferences that were not seen. Participants who read the description of a source analogy erroneously recognized analogical inferences as being in the target description.In experiment 1 we modified the material of Isabelle Blanchette & Kevin Dunbar (2002) after further analyzing their research, the results are consistent with Blanchette & Kevin Dunbar (2002) that the analogical inferences integrated into the representations of target information. Experiment 2 explored the concrete process of analogical inferences integrating into the representations of the target information in the mapping stage. In experiment 2a, we explore which one is the more important between the structure characters and the surface characters of the problem. The result suggested that in the mapping stage the structure characters of the problem is more important. In experiment 2b, what we explored is whether the analogical inferences are formed automatically or strategically. When we got rid of the instructions between the target information and the target information, we could also get the same result with the Experiment 1, which shows that the analogical inferences are formed automatically. In experiment 3, we explored whether the participants could engage in analogical reasoning and whether the analogical inferences could integrate into the representations of the target when the style of the source information and the target information was different. The results showed that the difference of the style did not influence the occurrence of analogical reasoning.