Scholarship

Theories of analogical reasoning differ in the roles they ascribe to pragmatic factors as a source of constraints on analogical mappings. The multiconstraint theory as instantiated in the ACME model (Holyoak & Thagard, 1989a) claims that pragmatic constraints interact with structural and semantic constraints within the mapping stage itself, in addition to influencing pre-mapping and post-mapping stages. Participants in three experiments were asked to generate mappings between non-isomorphic analogs for which mappings for some elements were ambiguous on structural grounds. In all experiments, manipulations of participants’ processing goals influenced their preferred mappings. At the same time, goal-irrelevant information contributed to many-to-one mappings (Experiments 1 and 2) and to the resolution of mappings that were ambiguous on the basis of goal-relevant information alone (Experiment 3). The qualitative pattern of results was successfully simulated using the ACME model, implementing the impact of processing goals as an inhibitory process of selective attention.