Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study examined the role of detecting the initial causal system model followed by engaging in active vs. passive structural alignment in recognizing the key causal principles in subsequent novel examples. The results echo prior research on the benefit of analogical comparison in learning relational categories: participants who were prompted to compare outperformed participants in the baseline condition. Moreover, while the accurate representation of the causal system predicted noticing the relational structure in novel examples, making more accurate relational mappings made participants more likely to notice the structure above and beyond having an accurate representation. These findings offer insight into the role of active vs. passive analogical comparison and have implications for conditions that might support learning of relational categories.