Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study provides evidence for far analogicalretrieval, i.e., analogical retrieval across disparate taskdomains, as a result of analogical comparison. Participantsread source stories, which were then retrieved after a filleddelay through abstract letter-string cues that matched therelational form of key parts of stories. They then generatedresponses to an ambiguous letter-string analogy problem.Evidence was found for far analogical retrieval of higher-order relations because 1. comparison of letter-stringanalogies cued source stories specific to the relations showedin the letter-strings, and then 2. those same relations formedthe basis for how subjects solved novel letter-string problems.The experiment offers support for the schema inductionaccount of analogical retrieval, and suggests that people aremore sensitive to relational structures than was previouslythought.