Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Tversky demonstrated that the similarity of two objects increases with their commonalities and decreases with their differences. W e believe that determining commonalities and differences is a complex task. Using analogical mapping as a guide, we propose the process of frame-alignment which can be employed to find the commonalities and differences of structured representations. W e then test the predictions of this approach by asking subjects to list the commonalities and differences of word pairs that vary in their degrees of similarity. The results of this study support the predictions of the frame-alignment view.