Advantage Effect Of Relational Match In Analogy

The research about analogy and similarity had had great strides in the past two decades. Analogical processing had been shown to play a central role in human learning and reasoning, and a large number of important phenomena had been uncovered as a result of that. In fact, researchers had consistent view on main theory. However, there were basic issues which remained unresolved and assumptions that lacked a firm experimental foundation. The question of the research was which kind of match—relations, objects,—take an advantage. In this research, we explored plasticity of match in the process of the comparison and the relation between analogy and literal similarity.The research was divided into four experiments, in virtue of which we would test the hypothesis.In first experiment, the research showed standard sentences to participants (six sentences selected respectively and randomly), and then showed the corresponding six feature sentences. Participants were asked to judge whether the pairs of sentences were analogous and to respond as quickly as possible without sacrificing accuracy and collected the response latency. This main aim of this experiment was to study the status of relational match and object match preliminarily.The second experiment was similar to the first one, with having a little change. Therefore, we first gave people the same experimental materials as in Experiment one. Then,after having completed the task, participants were given a subset of the pairs and asked to again give their assessment of their analogical acceptability plus a justification for each response, collected the response latency also . Our assumption was that in most cases what would come to mind most easily would be the commonalities made salient in the just-prior online analogical evaluation task.In experiment three ,we asked participants to rate the similarity of the pairs of keywords used in Experiments one and two, to ensure that our word pairs did indeed decrease in similarity from syn to near to far.In experiment four, we asked participants to rate the similarity of pairs used in Experiments one and two, In contrast to Experiment three, participants rate the similarity of the whole sentence, not just the pairs of keywords.Our results bear out the theoretical claim that relational matches are central in the understanding of analogy. That this pattern was obtained even with the numbers of relational matches and object matches equated provides strong evidence for the primacy of relations. Further, our results suggest that when relations are similar but not identical, rerepresentation processes are engaged that find a partial match. In sum, the perception of overall similarity appears based on both relational alignment and object matches, but the perception of analogy is engendered by matching relational structure. The research also proved the flexibility of match in the process of comparison.