Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This work examines the influence of sensory modality constraints on analogical reasoning, focusing on the sensory modality in which the analogy is presented, the influence of verbal abilities, visuospatial abilities and structural factors like verbalisability and visualisability on analogical performance. Through three experiments, we explored how presentation modalities (written, auditory, and mixed) affect the accuracy and latency of analogical reasoning tasks in an A:B::C:D format. Results showed that written presentations yielded the highest accuracy and fastest response times, followed by auditory and mixed conditions. Verbal abilities, assessed with a naming task, strongly predicted performance across all modalities, while visuospatial abilities, measured with a mental rotation task, were particularly relevant in the mixed condition. Higher verbalisability and visualisability difficulty reduced performance across all conditions but to different extents depending on the modality of presentation, reflecting flexible engagement of each of these abilities depending on the task demands. These findings underscore modality-specific dynamics in analogical reasoning and highlight the critical role of cognitive abilities and the structural factors that are verbalisability and visualisability of the relational structure in shaping the ability to solve analogies.