Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Several studies have shown that similarity judgements involve a process of structural alignment akin to analogical mapping. In particular, it has been shown that people appear to rely more on the relational structure of scenes involving cross-mappings, if they have previously carried out a similarity judgement task on these scenes (e.g., Markman & Centner, 1993b). W e report a study which shows that similarity judgements do not necessarily invoke structural alignment but that other task demands and the materials presented are more critical in selecting the comparison mechanism used in a given situation. The wider implications of these results for models of similarity and comparison are considered.