Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study, we test the possibility that real-life events induce anabstract category activation in a way that permits structurally-basedretrievals. We used a free-recall reminding paradigm whereparticipants had to report any memory that come to mind when facedwith a target cue embodying a familiar concept. This methodallowed us to consider the retrievals of any analog that shares ameaningful structural similarity in the participants’ own eyes.Results revealed that most participants predominantly retrievedSuperficially Dissimilar Analogs (SDAs) rather than SuperficiallySimilar Disanalogs (SSDs). Interestingly, retrievals of SDAs werepreponderant over retrievals of Superficially Similar Analogs(SSAs). These data suggest that familiar abstract knowledge mayhave a more important role in promoting abstract encoding andstructurally-based retrievals than it was supposed to.