International Scientific Journals
of Scientific Technical Union of Mechanical Engineering "Industry 4.0"

Analogy-making is the most beautiful manifestation of the fundamental property of human’s thought. It shows how the incoming information maps to the already memorized old one, and they both change until fit consistently. What we see depends on what we already know and vice versa, what we know depends on what we have already seen. It is broadly accepted that ability to make deep analogies is one of the strongest predictors of the intelligence, the creativity, the ability to understand causal relationships. However, analogy-making, being one of the strongest instrument of human though, may have a dark side too. There are examples in the literature how wrong analogies may produce various fallacies of human thought. Widespread beliefs in world conspiracy, superstitions, etc. could be a product of wrong analogies. Different effects of the known phenomena of confirmation bias are also modeled by the sub-processes of analogy-making. This paper systematizes different types of fallacies and possibilities how those effects could be modeled within a cognitive architecture are discussed.

In their classical study, Sheppard and Metzler (1971) demonstrated that the speed of mental rotation of objects is linearly proportional to the angle that the objects should be rotated. However, Flusberg & Boroditsky, (2011) assume that depending on the instruction distinct processes take part in mental rotation task. The results of their empirical study usually are interpreted in favor of necessity to assume that dual processes (and hence dual representations) exist in human cognitive system. We conducted an experiment that confirms the hypothesis that different strategies, not different processes underlie the results of Flusberg & Boroditsky, (2011).

Nevertheless that the topic may seem too specialized, it supports the embodied view to human cognition. In this way, the findings have not only theoretical merits, but can be of high interest for education planning. Studying the effects of the body on the mind contributes the education planning and has an increasing role in mathematics education and problem solving issues in high school, college and beyond.