The Effects of Manifest Relational Similarity on Analog Retrieval

Abstract

The experiments presented here examined how varied representations of relational structure affect analog retrieval. Subjects were asked to identify analogies between disparate base and target passages. The expression of relations within analogs was varied to make the analogical similarity more or less manifest. Analog retrieval was better when passages (a) gave less instantiating detail and expressed analogous relations with relatively domain-general terms, i.e., terms that could fit both domains, as opposed to domain- specific terms whose components cannot apply literally to both domains, or (b) expressed local analogous relations by domain- general rather than domain-specific verbs, or (c) used a domain-general term to lexicalize a higher-order relation implicit in domain-specific detail. These results suggest that even when analogous relations are embedded in dissimilar contexts, the way relations are represented within those contexts can affect analogical access. Access is easier with manifest representations that require little re-representation to reveal a match across domains.