The Effect of Working Memory on Analogical Mapping
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Date
01/07/2014Item status
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Lismanis, Jack
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Abstract
Analogical mapping is important in how humans learn new information from novel situations. There are two main types of analogies; scene analogies which are similar to everyday life requiring the relationship to be found and proportional analogies which are where a relationship is given and people use this to answer for a third item. In this experiment a third type of analogy is created by combining the scene analogy and the proportional analogy. This proportional scene analogy is an everyday scene which has a relationship highlighted for participants. This experiment aimed to investigate if there was any difference in reaction times (RTs) and percentage of correct answers across the three analogies. A further aim of this experiment was to investigate what affect a working memory dual-task would have on the RTs and percentage of correct answers of each analogy. In this experiment we utilised a N-back test for our dual-task. For this experiment our N-back test was a two back auditory test where participants attempted to match tones to those that were two tones previously. The participants were required to identify the item that matched another item that was show with a red circle for the scene tasks and they were required to identify the item that matched a chosen item (c) using the relationship provided. The results indicated that whilst the N-back test does negatively impact the analogies, it does not affect some analogies greater than others. It was found that there was a significant difference between all of the analogies in the percentage of correct answers with proportional analogies having the highest degree of accuracy and the scene analogies having the lowest. It was found that there was no significant difference between scene analogies and proportional scene analogies in the RT condition but there was a significant difference between these two types of analogies and the proportional analogies.