A cognitive psychological study of the mechanisms of recursion and analogy in emergent thinking.

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The concept "emergence" was at first coined by researchers of the complex systems approach. The concept means that with a limited set of units we think of tremendous number of new ideas. This is supported by at least two important mechanisms, namely, recursion which constructs a hierarchical linkage of knowledge and analogy which composes a horizontal linkage of knowledge. The aim of the present research is to investigate the roles of the two mechanisms by conducting several experiments. The first experiment was conducted using university students in a situation where the subjects were asked to judge between the alternatives (selling hamburgers at the list price or at a discount price) in a Prisoner's Dilemma Game. The recursive nature of the counterparts(instructed as a human or a machine) influenced the impression ratings of the counterpart; e.g., feeling wickedness to the tiffortat strategy. The second was to investigate primary school children's ability of understanding narratives. Global understanding of the text has closer correlation with understanding the second-order beliefs which needs recursive understanding of the mind than local understanding of the text. The third experiment was to investigate the processes of using analogy in understanding two famous people's life courses (Nightingale and Mother Teresa and six other pairs) by university students and showed that there are two cases in which analogy was preserved and in which analogy was changed dynamically.