Deliberate search for analogous cases aids the retrieval and transfer of suboptimally-encoded memory items

Abstract

Even though spontaneous retrieval of analogous cases lacking surface similarity with a target situation typically requires achieving an abstract representation of the target situation, recent studies on analogical argumentation suggest that the deliberate disposition to search for analogous cases in long-term memory (LTM) suffices to increase cross-domain retrieval significantly. However, a limitation of these studies concerns the impossibility to determine whether the analogous situations reported were invented rather than retrieved, and whether there were instances of analogical retrieval that were not reflected in participants’ arguments. To overcome these shortcomings, Experiment 1 resorted to a traditional transfer paradigm where a base analogue is learned prior to the presentation of the target situation during a contextually-separated phase. Results confirmed that an explicit indication to base persuasive arguments on analogous situations increases distant retrieval as compared to a baseline condition where the instruction to generate persuasive arguments did not include an indication to think of analogous cases. Experiment 2 generalised the retrieval advantage of voluntary search to the activity of generating explanatory hypotheses for a counterintuitive phenomenon, a more prototypical variety of knowledge transfer that has been somewhat overlooked within analogy research. The theoretical and educational implications of the present findings are discussed.