Transfer Across Episodes of Analogical Reasoning: The Role of Visuo-Spatial Schemas

The standard explanation of meta-analogical transfer posits that the predicate mappings generated during a first analogy episode get reused during subsequent instances of analogical reasoning. As this account fails to predict the empirical result that only mappings between similar concepts get reliably transferred, other psychological mechanisms seem to be at play. Across three experiments, we obtained evidence suggesting that the carry-over of visuo-spatial schemas can also be involved in meta-analogical transfer. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated solutions to an ambiguous letter-string analogy whose alternative solutions involved different visuospatial operations. Prior to that, participants rated solutions to letter-string analogies aimed to elicit visuospatial operations that were either consistent, inconsistent or unrelated to the visuospatial operations underlying the later problem. Participants granted higher scores to solutions whose underlying visuospatial operations matched those elicited by the preparatory analogies. In Experiment 3, participants rated solutions to the target ambiguous analogies after watching short animations representing the visuospatial representations presumed to have been elicited by the preparatory analogies of Experiments 1 and 2. The fact that these animations biased participants' ratings in the same manner as in the previous experiments provides further evidence that dynamic visuo-spatial schemas can play a role in meta-analogical transfer.