Producing and recognizing analogical relations.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Behavior Analysis
• Linguistics

Background:

• Analogical reasoning is crucial for intelligent behavior, language, and cognition.
• Relational Frame Theory (RFT) models analogy as deriving relations among relations.
• Limited empirical work exists on analogy from a behavior analytic perspective.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the applicability of RFT to topography-based analogy.
• To extend RFT-based analogy research to nonsymmetrical relations.
• To demonstrate derived relational responding and analogy in a behavior-analytic lab.

Main Methods:

• Four studies trained participants in contextual control over stimulus relations (sameness, opposition, comparative).
• Arbitrary stimulus relations were learned in the presence of relational cues.
• Analogies were derived using directly trained and entailed relations, measured by productive and selection-based tasks.

Main Results:

• Participants recognized analogies in stimulus networks with same/opposite relations (Experiment 1).
• Analogy extended derived relations to novel stimuli (Experiment 2).
• Experiments 3 and 4 extended these findings to nonsymmetrical comparative relations.

Conclusions:

• The procedures facilitated relational responses consistent with RFT's account of analogy.
• This research demonstrated productive responding based on analogy in a behavior-analytic setting.
• Findings expand the empirical understanding of analogical reasoning within RFT.