Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An important property of analogical reasoning is that resulting inferences can be used to acquire new knowledge in a target domain. However, little is known about what happens to memory for these inferences. In this study, we explore the link between analogical reasoning, inferences, and memory. We gave participants information on a political debate. Some subjects were given a short text and other subjects were given a long text to read. In addition, half the subjects were given an analogy at the end of the text. A week later, subjects were brought back and asked to recall the information. We were particularly interested in whether subjects would (a) remember the analogy, and (b) incorporate analogical inferences into their memory for the text. We found that when they were given more information, subjects did not report the analogy, but falsely included analogical inferences in their recall. Results were different when subjects were given a lesser amount of information they remembered the analogy and did not erroneously recall analogical inferences. Overall, the results indicate that memory for analogical inferences is highly related to the amount of information that people are given.