Analogy-making is an ability with which we can abstract from surface similarities and perceive deep, meaningful similarities between different mental objects and situations. I propose that mental objects are dynamically changing sets of potentially interchangeable connotations. Unfortunately, most models of analogy seem devoid of both semantics and relevance-extraction, postulating analogy as a one-to-one mapping devoid of connotation transfer.

Several authors have hailed intuition as one of the defining features of expertise. In particular, while disagreeing on almost anything that touches on human cognition and artificial intelligence, Hubert Dreyfus and Herbert Simon agreed on this point. However, the highly influential theories of intuition they proposed differed in major ways, especially with respect to the role given to search and as to whether intuition is holistic or analytic. Both theories suffer from empirical weaknesses. In this paper, we show how, with (...) some additions, a recent theory of expert memory (the template theory) offers a coherent and wide-ranging explanation of intuition in expert behaviour. It is shown that the theory accounts for the key features of intuition: it explains the rapid onset of intuition and its perceptual nature, provides mechanisms for learning, incorporates processes showing how perception is linked to action and emotion, and how experts capture the entirety of a situation. In doing so, the new theory addresses the issues problematic for Dreyfus’s and Simon’s theories. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Linhares and Brum (2007) argue that they provide evidence for analogy as the main principle behind experts’ acquisition of perceptual knowledge. However, the methodology they used—asking players to pair positions using abstract similarity—raises the possibility that the task reflects more the effect of directional instructions than the principles underlying the acquisition of knowledge. Here we replicate and extend Linhares and Brum’s experiment and show that the matching task they used is inadequate for drawing any conclusions about the nature of experts’ (...) perception. When expert chess players were instructed to match problems based on similarities at the abstract level (analogy), they produced more abstract pairs than pairs based on concrete similarity. However, the same experts produced more concrete pairs than abstract ones when instructed to match the problems based on concrete similarity. Asking experts to match problems using explicit instructions is not an appropriate way to show the importance of either analogy or similarity in the acquisition of expert knowledge. Experts simply do what they are told to do. (shrink)

Expert chess players, specialized in different openings, recalled positions and solved problems within and outside their area of specialization. While their general expertise was at a similar level, players performed better with stimuli from their area of specialization. The effect of specialization on both recall and problem solving was strong enough to override general expertise—players remembering positions and solving problems from their area of specialization performed at around the level of players 1 standard deviation (SD) above them in general skill. (...) Their problem‐solving strategy also changed depending on whether the problem was within their area of specialization. When it was, they searched more in depth and less in breadth; with problems outside their area of specialization, the reverse. The knowledge that comes from familiarity with a problem area is more important than general purpose strategies in determining how an expert will tackle it. These results demonstrate the link in experts between problem solving and memory of specific experiences and indicate that the search for context‐independent general purpose problem‐solving strategies to teach to future experts is unlikely to be successful. (shrink)