Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior research has shown that eliciting a relational mindset by completing distant propositional verbal A:B::C:D analogies boosts relational responding in a subsequent task. We tested this hypothesis with better-controlled stimuli for a scene-mapping task that includes both cross-mapped and non-cross-mapped scenes. The results show that participants who completed semantically distant verbal analogies preferentially selected the relational match in both cross-mapped and non-cross-mapped scenes. The accuracy of the verbal analogies was also a significant predictor of relational matching. There was no effect of the type of scenes, and no interactions. Replicating prior work, these results show that the relational mindset was successfully elicited and that the accuracy of the generated solutions is an important predictor of performance on the subsequent task. This study builds upon existing literature and further supports the utility of inducing a broader relational mode of thinking that can facilitate subsequent relational reasoning.