CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

We carried out an experiment to assess whether an analogy can trigger the re-representation (conceived as redescription or recategorization) of a target analog (TA). More precisely, the experiment was designed to test: 1) whether a TA not initially regarded as a member of a category can be perceived as belonging to such category as a result of being paired with a base analog (BA) independently tested as a prototypical exemplar, and 2) whether a TA considered as a marginal example of a category can be perceived as a more typical example as an effect of the analogical mapping. Participants in the analogy group read 12 analogies (e.g., Peter gave a perfume to Mary, what made her feel uncomfortable. The next day Peter played a joke on Mary, and she felt uncomfortable for an analogous reason as the day before) and were asked to explain the effect of the TA of every one of them (e.g., Why did Mary feel uncomfortable this second time?). Then they had to rate on a Likert scale (1= not representative at all, 7= the most representative case) the typicality of the TA as an instance of the category that the BA was established as typical case (e.g., how typical is playing a joke on a girl as an example of seduction). Participants in the no-analogy group received the BAs and TAs as separate situations and they had to explain the effect of the TAs and rate their typicality. The majority of the no-analogy group did not evoke the tested category in the TAs´ descriptions. In contrast, in the analogy group participants used the tested category to refer to the TAs in most of the cases. Participants in the analogy group rated higher (i.e., more typical) the TA as an instance of the tested category than participants in the no-analogy group. In sum, the data supports the idea that mapping sometimes leads to a re-representation consisting in a novel categorization of the TA or in an increase in the perception of typicality of a situation as a member of a certain category.

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