A HYBRID MODEL OF REASONING BY ANALOGY

So two main difficulties have been encountered in human problem solving in this case: (1) recalling
the "immersion heater situation" and (2) retrieving an object corresponding to the immersion heater
in the target situation. It is obvious that both difficulties concern the retrieval mechanism, and the
model has to explain them.
2.2. Priming Effects on Reasoning (Problem Solving)
In the experiment discussed above, since the "immersion heater situation" is well known to the
subjects from their experience before the experiment, the hint condition results in only ignoring the
retrieval process and immediately starting to seek a correspondence between the cases. In contrast
to that, a priming condition would still rely on spontaneous retrieval of the "immersion heater
situation" and noticing the similarities, but in addition to that the subjects' preliminary settings
would be changed so that they could retrieve that source more easily. This is achieved by
stimulating (activating) the source before presenting the target problem and in this way increasing
its accessibility.
It must be noted that most priming effect experiments are performed with low-level tasks like items
recognition, lexical decision, word completion, etc. while Kokinov (1990) has explored the
existence of priming effects in problem solving. The following reviews only part of these results
(concerning only analogy) combined with the results obtained from some additional and more
recent experimental sessions.
Subjects have to solve a number of diverse problems including mathematical, physical and
common-sense ones in a mixed order. One of these problems is the target "wooden vessel
problem" and another (prior to that one) is the priming problem: "How can you make tea in a
glass". There are 3 different priming conditions: (1) the near priming condition where the priming
problem is presented immediately before the target one, (2) the far priming condition where a
single distractor problem (with a limit of 4 minutes for solving it) is given to the subjects between
the priming and the target problems, and (3) the very far priming condition where there are 8
distractor problems (24 minutes) between the priming and the target ones. The priming effect is
measured by the success/failure ratio rather than by reaction time because with such high-level
tasks (as is problem solving) the reaction time depends on too many factors, it is difficult to
measure and is therefore an unreliable parameter.
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The results are shown in Table 2 and the differences between the four groups of subjects are found
to be statistically significant applying the chi-square criterion. In this way it is demonstrated that 1)
there is a clear priming effect on analogical problem solving, 2) this effect decreases in the course
of time, 3) it lasts for a certain period (at least 4 minutes) and, finally, 4) it disappears in less than
24 minutes. This can be illustrated by Figure 1.
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All these results are to be explained by the model.