CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The structure-mappingapproach to analogical reasoning posits that drawing an analogy consists indiscovering that two situations share a system of relations and roles, and thatsemantic differences between the objects that play the role of arguments of correspondingrelations (alignable differences) have little or no effect on judgments ofanalogical relatedness. According to an alternative account (Minervino,Oberholzer & Trench, 2013) people concentrate on relational matches onlywhen failing to represent the compared situations as exemplars of aschema-governed category. When the compared events are assigned to a sharedcategory of events (e.g., two cases of murder), people?s judgments ofanalogical relatedness are based on how both situations fare along relevant dimensionsof that category (e.g., the cruelty of the murders). From this perspective itfollows that differences between the arguments of two situations couldpotentially affect the entire representation of the events, thus leading to differentjudgments of analogical relatedness. Inthe present study we assessed how the objects that take part in two analogous visualscenes influenced judgments of analogical relatedness under two experimentalconditions, one emphasizing the fact that the scenes belonged to a commonschema-governed category, and the other emphasizing their shared relations. Participantsin the ?similar categories? conditions received a scene in which an agent was exertingan action to an object (e.g., a man giving a pair of socks to a woman). Thisscene was followed by another scene involving similar actions and charactersbut a different object, as well as by the indication that the two scenes werecases of the same category of events (e.g., two ?awards?). While for half ofthe participants the object was chosen such that the new action would becomparable to the base action in terms of a relevant dimension of such category(e.g., the importance of the award), for the other participants the object waschosen such that the new action would be less similar to the base action interms of such dimension. Participants in the ?similar relations? conditionsreceived the same pairs of scenes, but framed under a common label thatemphasized their shared relation (e.g., two cases of ?giving?).Resultsshowed that when the compared situations are framed under a common relationalcategory, participants are sensible to alignable differences along the relevantdimensions of that category, thus assigning lower ratings to analogies in whichthe compared situations show contrasting values on such dimensions. Incontrast, this manipulation had no effect when the presentation of the scenes didnot emphasize their inclusion into a common schema-governed category, but insteademphasized their shared relational predicate. These results support the adequacyof the category-based approach for analyzing a wealth of realistic situationsthan have been overlooked by standard approaches.

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