Literature on memory research shows that when memorizing,
people may blend two situations, i.e. when memorizing one
story, they add elements from another story. Most of the
cognitive models assume that the superficial similarity
between two episodes is the primary factor for blending.
However, there is evidence that people blend dissimilar
stories as well, if these stories share the same relational
structure. We contrasted the two factors in a single study and
performed experiments with the same design and stimuli with
adults and with 4-5-year-old children. The results show that
there is no qualitative difference between the performance of
adults and children. Also, both adults and children blend
either pictures that have surface or structural similarity
depending on the abstractness of the objects in them.