Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To understand and aa upon new experiences, people may draw on specific past experiences. Analogical transfer models suggest that past experiences are used following the encoding of the new information. Research on reminding s suggests that specific experiences may be accessed during encoding, and text comprehension research suggests available information may be used to interpret incoming material. Together, these findings suggest a more dynamic organization of interpretation processes, where past experiences may be accessed and used during encoding. This paper repeats on two experiments that explore the relationship between reminding and interpretation. In particular, the question was whether remindings that occur early during encoding might bias later interpretation. The first experiment used a postprocessing measure of interpretation, while the second measured on-line sentence reading times. In contrast to most contemporary models of analogical transfer, we found that remindings m a y influence interpretation during encoding.