Representational Change and Analogy: How Analogical Inferences Alter Target Representations

The ways that analogy alters the representation of target information was investigated in 4 experiments. Participants read information about a target, followed by a potential source analog. Participants later completed a recognition test in which some of the sentences were old, some novel, and some analogical inferences that were not seen before. Participants who read the description of a source analog erroneously recognized analogical inferences as being in the target description. The effect occurred with different delays between study and test and with an unfamiliar target domain. It also occurred when source and target shared few superficial features. Reading-time data suggest that participants were drawing analogical inferences when encoding the source. Overall, these experiments show that analogical inferences are incorporated in the representation of the target and cannot be differentiated from information actually presented.