CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Title of Symposium: Abstract Relational Thinking: Metaphor, Spatial Representation, andCreativity Coord: Dr. Adam E. Green (Georgetown University, EEUU)Title of presentation: Retrieving distant analogs by constructing idealized representations of the targetThe difficulties of our memory systems for retrieving distant analogs pose a relevant challenge to education: potentially useful learning often fail to be retrieved during the processing of analogous situations with which they lack surface resemblances. While some eduationally-oriented interventions have succeeded in inducing an encoding of learning materials that renders them more retrievable in the absence of surface overlap, these interventions can not help improving the retrieval of source situations whose structural features had not been highlighted during their initial encoding. In recent times, some evidence has accumulated for the idea that the abstraction of a target situation at retrieval time could boost the retrieval of suboptimally encoded analogs. However, the target-comparison strategy used for eliciting this backwards transfer effect requires the reasoner to be provided "ad hoc" with a second unsolved situation with which the first one will need to be compared. In the present talk will discuss the results of two approaches we have been following to overcome this limitation in applicability. In one set of studies, we obtained that while for some cognitive activities the sole indication to purposely seek for analogous situations can suffice to aid analogical retrieval, for others (e.g. problem solving), this intervention was not sufficient. Next I will present the results of a portable intervention specifically designed to boost retrieval during problem-solving. We obtained that students who were encouraged to construct perceptually-lean representations of the target problem were more likely to retrieve distant analogs than participants who constructed either perceptual concrete or no simulations of the situation models of the problems. I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

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