Analogy-Making as Perception A Computer Model - Neural Network Modeling and Connectionism

The psychologist William James observed that "a native talent for perceiving analogies is...the leading fact in genius of every order". The centrality and the ubiquity of analogy in creative thought have been noted again and again by scientists, artists and writers, and understanding and modelling analogical thought have emerged as two of the most important challenges for cognitive science.;"Analogy Making as Perception" is based on the premise that analogy-making is fundamentally a high-level perceptual process in which the interaction of perception and concepts gives rise to "conceptual slippages" which allow analogies to be made. It describes Copycat - a computer model of analogy-making, developed by the author with Douglas Hofstadter, that models the complex, subconscious interaction between perception and concepts that underlies the creation of analogies.;In Copycat, both concepts and high-level perception are emergent phenomena, arising from large numbers of low-level, parallel, non-deterministic activities. In the spectrum of cognitive modeling approachers, Copycat occupies a unique intermediate position between symbolic systems and connectionist systems - a position that is at present the most useful one for understanding the fluidity of concepts and high-level perception.;On one level the work described here is about analogy making, but on another level it is about cognition in general. It explores such issues as the nature of concepts and perception and the emergence of highly flexible concepts from a lower-level "subcognitive" substrate.