Analogy Generation in Science Experts and Novices

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Expertise Studies
• Science Education

Background:

• Inconsistent findings exist regarding analogical retrieval in the literature.
• Laboratory studies show poor retrieval of deep relational commonalities, contrasting with historical/naturalistic research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if expertise influences analogical retrieval based on deep relational commonalities.
• To test the hypothesis that remindings based on relational principles increase with expertise.

Main Methods:

• Developed a simple analogy-generation task adaptable across expertise levels.
• Presented common events to participants to generate analogies.
• Analyzed analogy generation based on domain-specific causal principles.

Main Results:

• Expert geoscientists spontaneously generated geoscience analogies when events were explainable by geoscience principles.
• Prompting increased causal analogy generation in non-experts and non-geoscience experts, but not expert geoscientists.
• All groups required prompting for analogies when events related to principles outside their domain.

Conclusions:

• Spontaneous use of causal principles is a hallmark of expertise.
• Experts habitually encode information using domain-specific relational principles.
• This encoding contributes to experts' propensity for spontaneous relational retrieval, impacting science instruction.