Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: Just as the heights of architectural achievement are not attained by piling on yet another brick but by composing more elegant and robust structures, so too the heights of human cognitive achievement are not attained by piling on yet another brute fact but by composing more elegant and robust mental structures. Dedre Gentner's fundamental contributions have come from the interdisciplinary study of these mental structures, the symbolic and iconic scaffolding that supports these structures, and the structure-mapping process by which we learn and apply these structures in our thinking. Her work includes generative psychological theorizing, a substantial body of empirical findings with children and adults, and a robust computational toolkit. In her honor as the recipient of the 2016 Rumelhart Prize, this collection of papers illustrates the breadth and depth of her achievements, which have advanced our understanding of analogy, similarity, and metaphor; of learning; of cognitive development; of language and its relation to thinking; and of cognitive architecture. Dr. Gentner is a fitting recipient of the Rumelhart Prize, because she is a true cognitive scientist. She draws extensively from work in psychology, linguistics, education, and artificial intelligence for her work. Furthermore, she has made profound contributions to the study of adult cognition and cognitive development. Her early work explored the kinds of representations that would help to explain similarity among verbs. Unlike similarities in objects, verbs differ from each other primarily in the relations they convey. Thus, she explored the nature of these kinds of relations. Her structure-mapping theory of comparison emerged from this analysis of relational representations, because any representation gains power only from the processes that act on it. Structure mapping theory is an elegant comparison process that explains several key aspects of analogy and similarity. It has also been extended into a computational model in collaboration with Ken Forbus and many others. Quite a bit of Dr. Gentner's work has looked at the psychological implications of structure mapping theory for a variety of aspects of cognition. The work has demonstrated that children and adults are facile at paying attention to the relational similarities of pairs. They can draw new implications about one domain based on its similarity to another by drawing candidate inferences. People prefer coherent systems of matches to independent matches. Her work has also extended structure-mapping theory (which was initially a theory of analogy) to ordinary similarity comparisons. This work highlights that people focus on differences that emerge from commonalities observed in structural comparisons. These differences—called alignable differences—are important for a wide range of cognitive processes that require comparisons. Dr. Gentner has also explored how this work influences our understanding of language comprehension in a variety of ways. She has examined the way that many metaphors draw relational comparisons across domains. She has explored the career of metaphor in which an active comparison process is crucial for the initial understanding of new metaphors, but that these metaphors can become packed away and retrieved as they become conventional. Her work on language also examines key aspects of the acquisition of verbs. Her studies demonstrate the importance of learning about nouns that can serve as the elements related by verbs before verbs can be acquired. In addition, Dr. Gentner is deeply interested in the implications of relational representations for learning. At the level of basic research, she has examined how relations and particularly relational language are a crucial element of what makes humans so smart. In addition, she has examined the implications of structure mapping theory for how children learn. The mechanisms of structure mapping theory and the power of relational language have a significant impact on people's ability to learn complex concepts. Finally, Dr. Gentner's work has had a crucial impact on the field at large. The coherent body of work she has produced has influenced researchers across all the fields of cognitive science. And within the field of psychology, it has affected work on animal cognition, cognitive development, and adult cognition. Her large body of students, colleagues, and collaborators will continue to affect the field for many years.
Source: Topics in Cognitive Science
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12281
Authors: Jeffrey Loewenstein, Arthur B. Markman
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2619443624