The Experimental Tradition

Abstract

Educators have long been concerned with the difficulties faced by students when it comes to applying their knowledge to contents and contexts different from those of the original learning (i.e., the “problem of inert knowledge”). However, only since the 1980s a number of psychological investigations started to unveil the causes of these transfer difficulties. Chapter 2 reviews the parallel results of two experimental traditions in the study of analogical retrieval: studies of analogical problem-solving and cued-recall experiments of story reminding. Both threads of studies document the pervasive role of surface similarities in analogical retrieval: source analogs (i.e., stored situations whose deep structure is isomorphic to the situation being currently processed) are seldom retrieved when their individual elements are not semantically similar to those of the target situation. The chapter goes on to illustrate how the observed centrality of surface-level similarities has inspired the dominant computer simulations to date, as well as to advance some conjectures about the adaptive advantage of retrieving “literally” similar episodes during the Pleistocene’s environment.