In contrast to the paucity of prior work on connection operations, most conceptual
inquiry into visual figures in advertising has examined similarity comparisons,
often under the label of ‘visual metaphor’ (Phillips, 2003). In figures of
similarity, an ad suggests that two images are the same in some way (‘A is like B
because . . .’) and invites the consumer to compare the two images to generate one
or more inferences regarding other similarities between them. That is, the ad asks
the consumer to draw an analogy between the two images to understand how they
relate to one another. Analogy is one of the core processes of cognition (Forbus,
2001), and the process of analogous thinking can be separated into several basic
cognitive steps: