Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Neuropsychological investigations with frontal patientshave revealed selective deficits in selecting the relationalanswer to pictorial analogy problems when the correctoption is embedded among foils that exhibit highsemantic or visual similarity. In contrast, normal age-matched controls solve the same problems with near-perfect accuracy regardless of whether high-similarityfoils are present (in the absence of speed pressure).Using more sensitive measures, the present study soughtto determine whether or not normal young adults aresubject to such interference. Experiment 1 used eye-tracking while participants answered multiple-choice 4-term pictorial analogies. Total looking time was longerfor semantically similar foils relative to an irrelevantfoil. Experiment 2 presented the same problems in atrue/false format with emphasis on rapid responding andfound that reaction time to correctly reject falseanalogies was greater (and errors rates higher) for thosebased on semantically or visually similar foils. Thesefindings demonstrate that healthy young adults aresensitive to both semantic and visual similarity whensolving pictorial analogy problems. Results areinterpreted in relation to neurocomputational models ofrelational processing.