Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent results demonstrate that inducing an abstractrepresentation of target analogs at retrieval time aids access toanalogous situations with mismatching surface features (i.e.,the late abstraction principle). A limitation of currentimplementations of this principle is that they either require theexternal provision of target-specific information or demandvery high intellectual engagement. Experiment 1 demonstratedthat constructing an idealized situation model of a targetproblem increases the rate of correct solutions compared toconstructing either concrete simulations or no simulations.Experiment 2 confirmed that these results were based on anadvantage for accessing the base analog, and not merely on anadvantage of idealized simulations for understanding the targetproblem in its own terms. This target idealization strategy hasbroader applicability than prior interventions based on the lateabstraction principle, because it can be achieved by a greaterproportion of participants and without the need to receivetarget-specific information.