Analogical Encoding: Facilitating Knowledge Transfer and Integration

People’s ability to recall and use prior experience when faced with current problems is surprisingly limited. We suggest that one reason is that information is often encoded in a situationspecific manner, so that subsequent remindings are limited to situations that are similar to the original both in content and in context. Analogical encoding—the explicit comparison of two partially understood situations—can foster the discovery of common principles and allow transfer to new structurally similar situations. This paper addresses two new questions: (1) whether comparison can also improve people’s ability to retrieve examples from long term memory; and (2) whether simply providing the common principle would suffice to promote transfer. The results show (1) that not only does comparing examples facilitate transfer forward to a new problem, it can also facilitate transfer backwards to retrieve an example from memory; and (2) providing a common principle is not sufficient: comparison is still beneficial.