Experimental Study On The Effects Of Surface And Structural Feature Matches On The Analogical Access

Analogical problem solving is an important component of human cognition. There are some subprocesses in analogical problem solving, such as accessing, mapping and evaluation. Competing theories of analogical reasoning have disagreed on the relative contribution of surface and structural features to the subprocesses of analogy. This study applied a new method to manipulate the number of surface and structural matches between base and target problems, in order to determine their effect on the subprocesses of analogy. There were two experiments in present study using story analog to investigate the effect of surface and structural similarities on analogy and its subprocesses. In experiment 1, the author investigated the effect of number of surface feature and first-order relation (FOR) matches between base and target problems when a higher-order relation (HOR) was shared. In experiment 1, the author investigated the effect of number of surface feature and first-order relation (FOR) matches between base and target problems when a higher-order relation (HOR) was not shared.Two experiments totally sampled 180 subjects and the results showed that:...