How One's Hook Is Baited Matters for Catching an Analogy

Memory provides an ocean of possibilities, so it is necessary to find good ways to bait one's hook to ensure catching something worthwhile. Intelligent action requires linking useful, previously learned examples with current problems, which very often means intelligent action requires retrieving analogies. We already know that effectively encoding the underlying structure in examples during initial learning facilitates later retrieving them as analogies. My colleagues and I have recently found that it is also possible to facilitate retrieving analogies by effectively encoding the example serving as a probe to memory, without relying on any special encoding of the stored examples. Thus, people do not have to learn examples well initially to still make good use of them, a finding with useful implications for problem solving, creativity, and acquiring domain knowledge.