Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Analogy and similarity are widely agreed to beimportant in learning and reasoning. Yet people Areoften unable to recall an analogy which would beinferentially useful. This finding suggests that acloser examination of the similarity factors thatpromote retrieval is necessary. We approached thisproblem by investigating the role of relationalcommonalities (higher-order relations and first-orderrelations) and common object-descriptions in theaccessiblity and inferential soundness of an analogy.Subjects first read a large number of stories. Oneweek later they were given a new set of stories toread. These new stories were designed to form matcheswhich shared different combinations of objectdescriptions,first-order relations and higher-orderrelations with the original stories. Subjects wereasked to recall any stories from the original set thatcame to mind. Afterwards they rated the matches forsubjective soundness and similarity.The results of two experiments showed thatsubjects recalled the original stories that sharedcommon object descriptions and first-order relationswith the new stories. These results support the ideathat similarity based access is enhanced by acombination of surface similarity and first-orderrelations. They also suggest that common higher-orderrelations play a smaller part in recall. In contrast,in both the soundness-rating and similarity-ratingtasks subjects rated the pairs that shared higher—orderrelations higher than the pairs which shared surfacesimilarity. This suggests that those aspects ofsimilarity that govern recall are different than thoseaspects that govern similarity-ratings and soundnessratings.