Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An unexplored means by which analogical transfer might take place is through indirect priming through the interaction of text comprehension and memory retrieval processes. Remind is a structured spreading-activation model of language understanding and reminding in which simple transfer can result from indirect priming from previously processed source analogs. This paper describes two experiments based on Remind's priming-based transfer framework. In Experiment 1, subjects (1) summarized analogous source stories' common plot; (2) rated the comprehensibility of targets related to sources by similar themes, contexts, or themes and contexts; then (3) described any sources incidentally recalled during target rating. Source/target similarity influenced comprehensibility and reminding without any explicit mapping or problem-solving. In Experiment 2, subjects (1) rated each story's comprehensibility in source/target pairs having similar relationships to each other as in Experiment 1; then (2) rated source/target similarity. Analogous targets were rated as more comprehensible than non-analogous targets. Both experiments imply that transfer can be caused by activation of abstract knowledge representations without explicit mapping.