Perceptual Similarity and Analogy in Creativity and Cognitive Development.

We argue for the position that analogy represents the core mechanism in human cognitive development rather than being a special cognitive skill among many. We review some developmental psychology results that support this claim. Analogy and metaphor, on the other hand, are seen as central for the creative process. Whereas mainstream research in artificial creativity and computational models of reasoning by analogy stresses the importance of matching the structure between the source and the target domains, we suggest that perceptual similarities play a much more important role. We provide some empirical data to support these claims and discuss their consequences.