Kretz Donald R, Krawczyk Daniel C
School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX, USA.
School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX, USA ; Department of Psychiatry, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center Dallas, TX, USA.
Front Psychol. 2014 Nov 26;5:1333. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01333. eCollection 2014.
The use of analogy is an important component of human cognition. The type of analogy we produce and communicate depends heavily on a number of factors, such as the setting, the level of domain expertise present, and the speaker's goal or intent. In this observational study, we recorded economics experts during scientific discussion and examined the categorical distance and structural depth of the analogies they produced. We also sought to characterize the purpose of the analogies that were generated. Our results supported previous conclusions about the infrequency of superficial similarity in subject-generated analogs, but also showed that distance and depth characteristics were more evenly balanced than in previous observational studies. This finding was likely due to the nature of the goals of the participants, as well as the broader nature of their expertise. An analysis of analogical purpose indicated that the generation of concrete source examples of more general target concepts was most prevalent. We also noted frequent instances of analogies intended to form visual images of source concepts. Other common purposes for analogies were the addition of colorful speech, inclusion (i.e., subsumption) of a target into a source concept, or differentiation between source and target concepts. We found no association between depth and either of the other two characteristics, but our findings suggest a relationship between purpose and distance; i.e., that visual imagery typically entailed an outside-domain source whereas exemplification was most frequently accomplished using within-domain analogies. Overall, we observed a rich and diverse set of spontaneously produced analogical comparisons. The high degree of expertise within the observed group along with the richly comparative nature of the economics discipline likely contributed to this analogical abundance.
类比的运用是人类认知的一个重要组成部分。我们生成并交流的类比类型在很大程度上取决于许多因素，比如场景、在场的领域专业水平以及说话者的目标或意图。在这项观察性研究中，我们在科学讨论期间记录了经济学专家，并考察了他们所生成类比的范畴距离和结构深度。我们还试图描述所生成类比的目的。我们的结果支持了之前关于在主体生成的类比中表面相似性出现频率较低的结论，但也表明距离和深度特征比之前的观察性研究中更为均衡。这一发现可能归因于参与者目标的性质以及他们专业知识的更广泛性质。对类比目的的分析表明，生成更一般目标概念的具体源示例最为普遍。我们还注意到类比旨在形成源概念视觉图像的频繁实例。类比的其他常见目的包括添加生动的表述、将目标纳入源概念（即归入）或区分源概念和目标概念。我们发现深度与其他两个特征中的任何一个都没有关联，但我们的研究结果表明目的与距离之间存在一种关系；也就是说，视觉意象通常需要一个域外源，而举例说明最常通过域内类比来完成。总体而言，我们观察到了一组丰富多样的自发产生的类比比较。被观察群体中的高度专业知识以及经济学学科丰富的比较性质可能促成了这种类比的丰富性。
