CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The present study was aimed at assessing the effect of objectsimilarities on participants´ evaluations of analogical quality.Results from an experimental condition in which the relationsinvolved in the compared situations were explicitlyhighlighted, showed that general object similarities(membership to same category) positively affected theevaluations of analogical quality. In contrast, no such effectwas found under another experimental condition in which theanalogical comparisons between the same situations wereframed by a schema-governed category. An analysis ofparticipants´ justifications revealed that the object similaritiesthat were taken into account under this second condition wererelated to central dimensions of the schema-governedcategory that was used to frame the analogies. We explainthese findings within the category assignment approachdeveloped by Minervino et al., and discuss the implications ofthis alternative perspective of analogical reasoning for the roleof similarities between entities playing several thematic roles