Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Re-representation is a crucial component of structure mappingtheory, allowing individuals to notice structural commonalitiesbetween situations that do not initially have identical relationalrepresentations. Despite its theoretical importance, however, thisconcept has been the subject of very little empirical work. In twoexperiments, we find that a case’s participation in one comparisonsystematically changes its perceived similarity to new cases, in apattern consistent with re-representation. Additional work rules outalternative explanations based on relational priming.