Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Lack of transfer may result in part from a critical, though often ignored factor: the form of the initial representation of information during the process of analogical transfer. Using a Gick and Holyoak (1980, 1983) replication, in which subjects read a story in the guise of a memory experiment, subjects were later required to solve a problem which could be solved using an analogous strategy suggested by the story. Transfer performance was measured by the presence or absence of this target solution in subjects' protocols. The text of the original General story (from Gick & Holyoak) was modified slightly in one condition, where one role in the story was replaced by another type of actor. The changes were minor, as shown by the fact that the story modification did not affect similarity ratings between the story and problem. However the changes did appear to affect subjects' initial representation of the story and, as a result. Improve subsequent transfer to the problem. The results indicate that forming an initial representation of the story that is congruent with important features of the problem is critical for analogical transfer. Subjects' abstraction of a general problem solving schema is an inadequate explanation of these results.