CNC seminár z kognitívnej vedy - Margarita Pavlova (26.3.2025)

v stredu 26.3.2025 o 11:30 hod. v miestnosti I/9 aj online formou

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Prednášajúci: Dr. Margarita Pavlova (New Bulgarian University, Sofia)

Názov prednášky: Analogy in Human Thinking

Termín: 26.3.2025, 11:30 hod., I 9 aj MS Teams

Abstrakt: 
Analogical reasoning – the ability to reason about common relations – is a hallmark of intelligence. In this talk, I will review analogy and analogical processing and present two studies on analogy in learning. The first study (Pavlova & Greenhoot, 2023) asked how people build transferable and generalizable knowledge by learning from examples. We investigated the conditions that make comparison and explanation beneficial to learning by comparing learning outcomes of engaging in explanation or comparison in a categorization task and examining how varying degrees of instructional support affect these two processes. The results showed an advantage of comparison over explanation; however, this was specific to combination of relational labels and definitions and prompts to compare. The second study Pavlova, 2024) examined the role of detecting the initial causal system model followed by engaging in active vs. passive structural alignment in recognizing the key causal principles in subsequent novel examples. The results echo prior research on the benefit of analogical comparison in learning relational categories: participants who were prompted to compare outperformed participants in the baseline condition. Moreover, while the accurate representation of the causal system predicted noticing the relational structure in novel examples, making more accurate relational mappings made participants more likely to notice the structure above and beyond having an accurate representation. These findings offer insight into the role of active vs. passive analogical comparison and have implications for conditions that might support learning of relational categories. 

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