ANALOGICAL REMINDING: A GOOD MATCH IS HARD TO FIND.

The authors seek to separate the variables that determine the accessibility of an analogical match from those that determine the predictive power of the match. Structure-mapping theory describes the rules by which people reason with an analogy once it is accessed. This theory is summarized. An experiment was conducted to create a naturalistic long-term memory access situation. The results show that similarity matches are important in determining both accessibility and inferential power of analogies. The conclusion concerning inferential soundness is that structure-mapping theory is correct: shared higher-order relational structure is the most important variable. The conclusion concerning access is that surface similarity between base and target is a strong determinant of the accessibility of a comparison.