Running head: MENTAL CONTENTS IN TRANSFER Mental Contents in Transfer

The purpose of this paper is to develop theoretical concepts for mental content-based investigations and explanations in the psychology of human thinking in general and transfer in specific. The schema-based analysis of transfer postulates that the solving of an earlier problem can influence a person’s future behaviour only to the degree of schematic similarity between the primary and the secondary problem solution. The reported content-based investigation, using Duncker’s (1935) classic tumour task, shows however, that the contents of schemata cause an essential variation in a person’s mental representation and judgement of radiation confluence effects. The study identified and assessed in separate experiments the influence of 3 different thought models (additive, balancing, and distribution-based) and 2 distinct types of spatial images of rays (compact vs. diverging). Whereas differences in the central tendencies of the judgements could expose some of the priming effects between experimental conditions, the core of the content-based analysis was based on the identification of distinct groups of participants displaying a certain type of judgement. These differences reflected the contrasts between the thought models and the ray image content. They substantiated the claim that a schema-based analysis of transfer and reasoning in general, alone is not sufficient enough to explain inter-individual and inter-contextual differences that are based on distinctive mental content in reasoners’ apperception. Mental