Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two leading analogical reasoning paradigms: A:B::C:D task and scene analogies, to date studied in isolation, were appliedto the same 61 participants. The former task included 3 types of distracting response options (relational, semantic, andperceptual); the latter task imposed cross-mapping (response options that suggested a wrong structure to be mapped). First,relational and semantic, but not perceptual, distractors were similarly frequently selected, but their choices were weaklycorrelated. These choices were unrelated to cross-mapping in the other task, either. So, various sources of distraction canplay a role in the analogical reasoning process.