Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Directional asymmetiy is a well-documented phenomenon in research on similarity, meuphor, and analogy. In this paper, we present an account of this phenomenon based on structural alignment. We propose that a major source of asymmetry is coherence imbalance: that is, a difference in the degree of systematicity of the relational structures being compared. These claims are tested in three experiments which examine the relationship between asymmetry, informativity, and conceptual coherence. The results support the hypodiesis that coherence imbalance is a key factor in directional comparison processes. Further, by incorporating the insights offered by structural alignment, coherence imbalance advances a more functional account of asymmetry.