Cognitive Complexity and Analogies in Transfer Learning

The ability to learn often requires transferring relational knowledge from one domain to another. It is difficult for humans and computers to identify the respective source domain from which relational characteristics can be applied to the target domain. An additional source of human reasoning difficulty is the complexity of the transformation function. In this article we investigate two domains in which the identification of relational patterns and of a transformation function are necessary: number series and geometrical analogy problems. Characteristics of the human processes are presented and existing cognitive models are discussed.