Preventing Inert Knowledge: Category Status Promotes Spontaneous Structure-based Retrieval of Prior Knowledg

Analogical comparison promotes spontaneous transfer by encouraging a more abstract representation that may be easier to retrieve. The category status hypothesis states that: if knowledge is represented as a relational category, it is easier to activate as a result of categorizing (as opposed to cue-based reminding). To investigate these two pathways to analogical transfer, participants were assigned to different study conditions: 1) standard comparison of two analogs; 2) standard comparison followed by a second comparison of two new analogs; or 3) a guided Category-building task based on sequential summarization. Experiment 1 found improved spontaneous transfer in the Category-building task when compared to the gold standard of Single-comparison. Experiment 2 provided evidence that improved transfer was due to facilitation of structure-based retrieval. Follow-up experiments tested alternative explanations of performance in the Category-building task. The findings support categorization as a novel pathway to spontaneous transfer and retrieval of structurally similar information.