Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Re-representation is a mechanism for aligning non-identical structurally corresponding predicates during compari-son. Re-representation is therefore a shift in the encoding of a stimulus from an initial set of elements to an altered set. Forexample, when comparing two analogous sentences, different verbs could be re-represented to allow a match – thereby alter-ing construal. Re-representation is theoretically and intuitively compelling, but difficult to demonstrate. We had participantscompare pairs of short text passages and judge them as potential analogies. At test, participants read an altered version of aprior passage and were asked to detect changes from the original. The alterations increased the semantic match between thepassage and its analog. Participants who had compared the original passage to the analog were less likely to detect changesthan those who compared to a non-analogous passage. As would be expected due to re-representation, analogical comparisonmade participants less sensitive to the changes.