Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The predominant view concerning determinants ofanalogical retrieval is that it is preferentially guided by superficialcues. In order to test the cognitive plausibility of a structuralsimilarities-based retrieval, we constructed a story-recall task inwhich life-like scenarios shared structural correspondences. InExperiment 1, we showed that such structural similarities induceretrievals when the participant had several source candidatesituations sharing superficial similarities with the target cue.Experiment 2 was designed to test whether the encoding wassufficiently oriented on structural similarities to drive retrievals,even if the participants possess only one source candidate situationwith superficial matches in memory. The results of the two presentexperiments lead us to conclude that in some contexts, abstractencoding induces a superiority of structural similarities oversuperficial ones in retrieval. Further implications for analogicalretrieval approaches are discussed.