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Is analogical reasoning a task that must be learned to solve from scratch by applying deep learning models to massive numbers of reasoning problems? Or are analogies solved by computing similarities between structured representations of analogs? We address this question by comparing human performance on visual analogies created using images of familiar three-dimensional objects (cars and their subregions) with the performance of alternative computational models. Human reasoners achieved above-chance accuracy for all problem types, but made more errors in several conditions (e.g., when relevant subregions were occluded). We compared human performance to that of two recent deep learning models (Siamese Network and Relation Network) directly trained to solve these analogy problems, as well as to that of a compositional model that assesses relational similarity between part-based representations. The compositional model based on part representations, but not the deep learning models, generated qualitative performance similar to that of human reasoners. 

We report a first effort to model the solution of meaningful four-term visual analogies, by combining a machine-vision model (ResNet50-A) that can classify pixel-level images into object categories, with a cognitive model (BART) that takes semantic representations of words as input and identifies semantic relations instantiated by a word pair. Each model achieves above-chance performance in selecting the best analogical option from a set of four. However, combining the visual and the semantic models increases analogical performance above the level achieved by either model alone. The contribution of vision to reasoning thus may extend beyond simply generating verbal representations from images. These findings provide a proof of concept that a comprehensive model can solve semantically-rich analogies from pixel-level inputs.