Time Development of Association Networks by Theory of Indeterminate Natural Transformation

Abstract

Analogy is an important cognitive process that supports human intellectual activity. It is useful in a wide range of mental activities that involve finding meanings in images, for example, mental activities such as metaphor comprehension, creativity, abduction, and transfer learning. There is the theory of indeterminate natural transformation (TINT; Fuyama, Saigo, & Takahashi, 2020) as a model of metaphor comprehension. TINT defines the meaning of a certain image as the sum total of associative relationships to the other images. Supposing that comprehension of a certain metaphor is a kind of creation of meaning, the process of metaphor comprehension can be expressed as the change of the associative relationships around and between the source and target of the metaphor. TINT requires a network of images connected by associative relationships. As a result of its computation, TINT rewrites the association network. So far, TINT has been implemented in a minimal form, and simulated and experimentally verified for only one metaphor comprehension process (Ikeda et al. 2021). Other than that, on the process of creating meanings, little research has been done about the time development of association networks. In this study, we analyze how the nature of the association network develops as TINT rewrites the associative relationship in the metaphor comprehension process.