Visual Analogy: Reexamining Analogy as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem1

Holyoak and Thagard proposed that the retrieval and mapping tasks of analogy can be viewed as constraint satisfaction problems, and described a connectionist implementation of their proposal. In this paper, we describe another constraint satisfaction method for the two tasks in the context of visual analogy: in our method, the source cases are organized in a discrimination tree, and all the source cases are searched at once. We also present an evaluation of the method for retrieval and mapping of 2-D line drawings from an external memory. The evaluation is based on structural constraints, and uses subgraph isomorphism as the similarity measure. One result is that a decomposition of the retrieval task into feature-based reminding and structure-based selection appears to provide little computational benefit over just selection.