Distant Connections: The Memory Basis of Creative Analogy

Máximo Trench is professor of psychology at the National University of Comahue and Adjunct Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research. He has taught graduate-level courses of cognitive processes at several Masters and Ph.D. programs (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Universidad de Palermo, FLACSO and UCES), and has served as visiting scholar at Indiana University-Bloomington with support from the Fulbright Commission and the Argentine Ministry of Education. His research is conducted both at the Bariloche campus of the University of Comahue and at the Patagonic Institute for Studies in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. His interests concentrate on the mechanisms underlying the generation and interpretation of analogical comparisons, as they take place during educationally-relevant activities such as learning, problem solving, argumentation, hypothesis generation, and comprehension. His intra and extramural projectsaim at developing cognitive interventions to increase access to analogically related learning that would otherwise remain inert in long-term memory.

Ricardo A. Minervino is professor of cognitive psychology at the National University of Comahue and Independent Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina. He has taught graduate-level courses of thinking and creativity in several Masters and Ph.D. programs (Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Universidad Nacional de la Plata, and FLACSO). His research is conducted both at the School of Education of the University of Comahue and at the Patagonic Institute for Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. His current projects are interested in determining the mechanisms that are involved in the production of a particular kind of analogies-those that are framed by schema-governed categories-, and the role that different pragmaticsplay in these processes. His broader interests extend to the role of conceptual metaphors in cognition and to the role of analogies in creativity.