Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We tested whether relational knowledge is represented as a set of relations among entities or as a set of relational roles towhich entities are bound. Participants performed four relational processing tasks with the same set of word-pair stimuli:relational exemplar generation; similarity ranking; analogical verification; and a paired-associate learning task. In thesimilarity ranking task, we gathered separate rankings for relational, role and semantic similarity between word pairs.Relational similarity predicted exemplar generation frequencies, analogical verification accuracy and RTs, and relationalluring in associative memory. Role similarity predicted exemplar generation frequency, and, weakly, analogical verificationRTs. Semantic similarity did not predict any of the tasks, after controlling for the other two factors. Contrary to currenttheories which posit that semantic similarity is more important for retrieving relevant analogues, and that analogicalmapping is based on role-filler bindings, relational similarity was the strongest predictor across all tasks.