A Closer Look at Structural Similarity in Analogical Transfer1

We propose to characterize structural similarity between source and target problems by the type and size of their structural overlap. Size of structural overlap is captured by a measure of graph-distance. We investigated the influence of structural overlap on transfer success in analogical problem solving in two experiments. In both experiments, for a fixed source problem one of five target problems had to be solved. In the first experiment, target problems varied in superficial and structural similarity to the source. In the case of isomorphic source/target relations superficial similarity had no impact on transfer success while for a partial isomorphic target solution success was only high if source and target had identical surface attributes. In the second experiment, surface of source and target were kept identical and different types of structural source/target relations were investigated: For problems with a high structural overlap source inclusive and target exhaustive source/target relations led both to high transfer success. For partial isomorphic problems with a decrease in structural overlap we could show that transfer was successful as long as the common part of source and target was larger than their different parts.

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