Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Traditional results using a cued-recall paradigm have allegedlydemonstrated that distant analogs tend to be retrieved less oftenthan disanalogous matches maintaining only surface similarity.Recent results, however, suggest that said advantage may be due tothe inadvertent inclusion of structural similarity in surface matches.In two experiments we had distant analogs compete in LTMwith two types of surface matches lacking any degree ofstructural overlap, but equated with the target in terms ofelement similarities. Distant analogs were less retrieved thatstories maintaining similar first-order relations and objects withthe target, but no overlapping structure. This differencedisappeared when surface similarity involved only similar objects.Results show that the surface superiority effect relies on thetype of surface matches that compete with distant analogs, thussuggesting a more complex picture of the forces that governaccess to similar items in memory.