Didierjean André, Nogry Sandra
University of Provence and CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France.
Mem Cognit. 2004 Oct;32(7):1053-64. doi: 10.3758/bf03196881.
Two experiments in reasoning by analogy were conducted to study the role of inducing source difficulty by reducing the salience of the source's structural elements. Three nonexclusive hypotheses were tested. According to the first, a difficult source problem improves analogical transfer because it increases the probability that the subject will notice the similarity between the source and the target. For example, errors made on both the source and the target can enhance the subject's awareness of the similarity between the two problems. According to the second hypothesis, a source that is difficult to solve is memorized better than an easier source. According to the third, source-problem difficulty affects the degree of abstractness in the representation of the solution elaborated by subjects. Experiment 1 showed that the higher frequency of spontaneous transfer between the source and the target when the source problem was difficult (Gick & McGarry, 1992) could be replicated in a cued-transfer situation. Experiment 2 showed that subjects given a difficult source, one in which the important element was not very salient, were better at categorizing isomorphic problems on the basis of structural features than were subjects given an easy source. The discussion deals with the implications of these results for the hypotheses tested and, more generally, for reasoning by analogy and education in general.
进行了两项类比推理实验，以研究通过降低源问题结构元素的显著性来增加源问题难度所起的作用。对三个并非相互排斥的假设进行了检验。根据第一个假设，一个难度较大的源问题会促进类比迁移，因为它增加了主体注意到源问题与目标问题之间相似性的概率。例如，在源问题和目标问题上都出现的错误可以增强主体对这两个问题之间相似性的意识。根据第二个假设，一个难以解决的源问题比一个较容易的源问题记忆得更好。根据第三个假设，源问题的难度会影响主体所阐述的解决方案表征中的抽象程度。实验1表明，当源问题难度较大时（吉克和麦加里，1992），源问题与目标问题之间自发迁移的较高频率能够在提示迁移情境中得到重复。实验2表明，与被给予容易源问题的主体相比，被给予难度较大源问题（其中重要元素不是很显著）的主体在根据结构特征对同构问题进行分类方面表现得更好。讨论部分阐述了这些结果对于所检验假设的意义，更广泛地说，对于类比推理和一般教育的意义。
