Distant Connections: The Memory Basis of Creative Analogy

Analogical thinking lies at the core of human cognition, pervading from the most mundane to the most extraordinary forms of creativity. By connecting poorly understood phenomena to learned situations whose structure is well articulated, it allows reasoners to expand the boundaries of their knowledge. 

The first part of the book begins by fleshing out the debate around whether our cognitive system is well-suited for creative analogizing, and ends by reviewing a series of studies that were designed to decide between the experimental and the naturalistic accounts. The studies confirm the psychological reality of the surface bias revealed by most experimental studies, thus claiming for realistic solutions to the problem of inert knowledge.

The second part of the book delves into cognitive interventions, while maintaining an emphasis on the interplay between psychological modeling and instructional applications. It begins by reviewing the first generation of instructional interventions aimed at improving the later retrievability of educational contents by highlighting their abstract structure. Subsequent chapters discuss the most realistic avenues for devising easily-executable and widely-applicable ways of enhancing access to stored knowledge that would otherwise remain inert. The authors review results from studies from both others and their own lab that speak of the promise of these approaches.