Automated Scientific Discovery and Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts Model

Contents

In this talk we present the Fluid Concepts cognitive model, developed by Douglas Hofstadter and his students over the last 30 years. Models in the Fluid Concepts tradition aim to provide a psychologically plausible description of perception and analogy-making, incorporating the parallel processing of bottom-up, data-driven percepts and topdown, expectation-driven hypotheses. We discuss these models' implications for scientific discovery.