Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Against the typical results from laboratory studies, it has beensuggested that retrieving distant analogs might be easy in real-life, where we tend to encode familiar situations with expert-like schemas. In each of two experiments, we formed twogroups of participants who, as determined by a questionnairepresented during a first session, had reported that they haveexperienced an event corresponding to a schema-governedcategory (Experiment 1) or to a system of schema-governedcategories (Experiment 2). While the episodes reported by oneof the groups belonged to the same domain as the target analogto be presented during the second session, those of the othergroup belonged to a different thematic domain. During atemporally and contextually separated session, the experimenterspresented both groups with a target analog belonging to theschema-governed category for which participants had reporteda base analog. Participants had to retrieve an autobiographicalepisode that they considered analogous to the situationpresented by the experimenter. In line with traditional studies,we found that retrieving distant instances of relationalcategories is much more difficult than retrieving closeinstances.