We tested whether analogical training could help children learn a key principle of elementary engineering-namely, the use of a diagonal brace to stabilize a structure. The context for this learning was a construction activity at the Chicago Children's Museum, in which children and their families build a model skyscraper together. The results indicate that even a single brief analogical comparison can confer insight. The results also reveal conditions that support analogical learning.

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Portions of this article are adapted from Garrett Honke's Master's thesis. A pre-print version is hosted on PsyArXiv. This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. We thank Katy Kam for her contributions in the development of this project, Sarah Laszlo and Peter Gerhardstein for comments on an earlier draft of the document, and the members of the Learning and Representation in Cognition (LARC) Laboratory at Binghamton University.

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Leading theories of psychological similarity are based on the degree of match in semantic content between compared cases (i.e., shared features, low dimensional distance, alignable relations). Broader forms of semantic relatedness such as the degree of association between cases (e.g., egg and spatula) are generally not considered to contribute to similarity judgments. However, empirical work has demonstrated a behavioral tendency to choose associated pairs over proximal pairs (i.e., high semantic content overlap) in similarity judgement tasks. As a result, dual-process models have been proposed that posit thematic integration in addition to content match as component processes of similarity. The present experiments investigate the thematic association effect in similarity in order to more clearly determine whether such a theoretical redirection is warranted. An alternative viewpoint is that confusion between similarity and association is the cause of the reported thematic bias. Experiment 1 introduces a modified similarity judgement task and addresses the impact of task instructions as a potential causal factor underlying the thematic association effect on similarity. Experiment 2 specifically compares the novel similarity task to a traditional two-alternative, forced choice triad task. Experiment 3 addresses the possibility of bias in the stimulus sets used in Experiments 1 and 2. Across the experiments we find association-based responding to be much less prevalent than in previous demonstrations: the traditional finding of a thematic preference only occurred when participants were specifically asked to select based on associativity (“goes with”). Modifications to conventional methodology that minimize biasing factors clearly attenuate the effect of association on similarity. We interpret these findings as evidence that that the thematic association effect derives from intrusions on psychological similarity, not from an additional component intrinsic to psychological similarity.