Analogy - recalling familiar past situations to deal with novel ones - can provide invaluable creative insights, but it can also lead to dangerous errors. In Mental Leaps, two leading cognitive scientists show how analogy works and how it can be used most effectively. Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard provide a unified, comprehensive account of the diverse operations and applications of analogy, including problem solving, decision making, explanation, and communication. They present their own theory of analogy, considering its implications for cognitive science in general, and survey examples from many other domains.