Effects of analogy to prior knowledge on memory for new information

Abstract

Two experiments explored how memory for new information is affected by awareness of parallels to pre-experimental knowledge. In one experiment, subjects studied brief biographies of fictional characters analogous to famous people. Best recognition resulted with the analogous famous person identified at Study and Test; identification at Study or Test alone interfered relative to no identification. A second experiment rejected accounts relying on simple matching between Study and Test contexts: A famous person's name was beneficial only when facts in the biography were true of that famous person. Our data suggest that the benefit of prior knowledge derives from the more elaborate encodings that analogy promotes. Implications for schema and depth-of-processing theories of memory are considered.