Retrieving a distant analog from memory in daily life is very unlikely, even in optimal conditions of encoding.

OLGUIN, V.; TRENCH, M.; MINERVINO, R.

Austin

Congreso; Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society; 2020

Cognitive Science Society

Against what laboratory studies show, it has been suggestedthat retrieving distant analogs might be easy in real-life, wherewe tend to encode situations with expert-like schemas. In twoexperiments, we first determined the availability of anautobiographical episode corresponding to a schema-governedcategory (Experiment 1) or to a system of schema-governedcategories (Experiment 2). In another context, participants hadto report an autobiographical episode that they consideredanalogous to the situation presented by the experimenter. Thesituation was another instance of the same category or systemof categories of the availability test. While in one condition thesituation pertained to the same domain of the autobiographicalepisode reported in the first phase, in the other condition it didnot. In accordance with traditional studies, we found thatdistant retrieval is very difficult in real-life and much moredifficult than near retrieval, even in extremely favorableconditions of encoding.