Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies of multiple-choice analogy problems suggested that some people use a more efficient but also harderconstructive strategy (they build the complete representation of analogy), whereas others tend to use a less effective but simplerresponse elimination. We tested whether salience of incorrect options (five per figural analogy problem) affected strategy use.Salient options in 18 problems missed many features from the (sixth) correct option; options in 18 non-salient problems missedonly few features. When controlling for working memory capacity, eye tracking yielded strongly correlating patterns of datathat suggested, in line with previous reports, large individual variance in strategy use. However, participants overall spent50% less time analyzing salient than non-salient options, suggesting that salience promoted the constructive strategy. Thisconclusion was supported by pupil size significantly predicting accuracy on problems with salient options, but not on thosewith non-salient options (which additionally yielded lower accuracy).