A method for selecting optimal analogies

Graphical user interfaces (and their analogies) make human interaction with computers “easier” by constraining a user´s actions and expectations. We adopt this view of analogy as an active participant in cognition rather than a passive data structure and use it to develop a psychological model accounting for the ubiquity and role of analogy in human cognition. This model is significant because: it operationalizes and provides a measure of “intuitiveness”, operationalizes the term “mental model” encompassing both the dynamic and concreteness effects associated with the term, accounts for the ubiquity and effectiveness of analogy in human cognition, provides a basis for ordering analogical representations by difficulty, and provides a unified framework for describing mental and environmental representations. Consequences of this model include identifying analogues which minimize the difficulty of translating between representations as well as predicting the relative difficulty for analogous problems. Data from experiments in which subjects solved problems by manipulating problem tableaux support the ordering of analogues and translations by difficulty