Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Analogical studies demonstrate that participants often fail to retrieve a well-learned base analog during the subsequent processing of a semantically-distant target analog. We evaluated whether presenting the target analog before the base analog increases analogical retrieval during hypothesis-generation. Experiment 1 revealed a higher rate of analogical retrieval when the target analog preceded the base analog, as compared to the traditional “base-target” sequence. Using a factorial design, Experiment 2 assessed whether spontaneously acknowledging the relevance of a subsequently encountered explanation for resuming a failed explanatory attempt requires the presence of structural similarities between the base and target situations. Results demonstrated that the primary contributor to spontaneous reactivation of a failed explanatory attempt is the presentation of an analogous phenomenon, while the presence of a useful explanation alone did not yield a significant impact. These findings contribute valuable insights to the dynamics of analogical retrieval and offer relevant implications for educational strategies.