Verbal Overshadowing of Analogical Retrieval

It has become almost a maxim that ‘‘talking through’’ a problem is advantageous. Contrary to this wisdom, studies from numerous domains have demonstrated that describing one’s thought processes or analyzing a judgment may, in some circumstances, actually impair performance. The two experiments reported here built upon prior work by examining the effect of verbalization on the retrieval of analogies. Participants read a series of 16 short stories. Later, they were presented with 8 test stories and indicated whether these stories were analogies of the stories they had read previously. Each test story shared the same deep structure with one prior story and only surface characteristics with another prior story. Half of the participants completed the test while thinking aloud, and half did not think aloud. In both experiments, participants who thought aloud were more likely to retrieve surface matches and less likely to retrieve true analogies than participants who did not verbalize their thoughts during the test. It is often helpful to ‘‘talk through’’ one’s thoughts, and, indeed, verbal reflection can aid both learning (e.g., Chi, 1996) and problem solving (Ahlum-Heath &DiVesta, 1986). Nevertheless, describing difficult-to-verbalize cognitions, such as the appearance of a face or a color, can impair performance (e.g., Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). Evidence suggests that such verbal-overshadowing effects occur because verbalization focuses subjects on verbally relevant information (e.g., facial features) at the expense of critical information that is less easily verbalizable (e.g., relations between facial features). Although most verbal-overshadowing research has focused on nonverbal stimuli (e.g., faces, tastes, colors, visual forms, sounds; for reviews, see Schooler, 2002; Schooler, Fiore, & Brandimonte, 1997), even verbal information can be vulnerable when the processes associated with it are difficult to describe. For example, Schooler, Ohlsson, and Brooks (1993) found that thinking aloud disrupted verbal insight problem solving. More recently, Sieck, Quinn, and Schooler (1999) examined whether verbalization affects people’s evaluation of the soundness of analogies (e.g., match evaluation; Gentner, 1989). Participants in this study saw pairs of stories that varied in their superficial or analogical similarity and judged the match (soundness) of each pair. Participants who wrote down reasons for their soundness judgments had higher ratings for all pair types relative to control participants, and their ratings showed less discrimination between superficially and analogically similar pairs. Sieck et al. suggested that participants’ explanations led them to activate surface features rather than structural features because the former are easier to articulate. Although the finding that verbalization disrupts people’s ability to evaluate analogies is of interest, an even greater cost would be implicated if verbalization also interfered with people’s ability to access analogies. The ability to recognize and use analogies plays a central role in learning, reasoning, and other important aspects of cognition (e.g., Gentner, 1989; Holyoak & Thagard, 1995). Nevertheless, people often fail to recall cases that are analogically related to situations they currently face (e.g., Gick & Holyoak, 1980). Given individuals’ inability to verbally appreciate deep-structure analogies, and their general difficulties retrieving information that relates at the deepstructure level, it seems quite plausible that verbalization might also interfere with people’s ability to retrieve analogies. The present study examined the effect of verbalization on the retrieval of analogies using a paradigm in which participants read 16 short stories and later took a test that contained 8 additional stories. Each test story was related to 2 prior stories from the study phase. In one case (mere-appearance match), the stories were similar in terms of shared objects (i.e., characters, places, and other nouns) and first-order relations (e.g., actions). In the other case (true analogy), the stories shared first-order and higher-order relations (relations between relations), but the objects differed (Table 1 provides examples of the stories). Participants were asked whether each test story was an analogy Address correspondence to Sean Lane, 236 Audubon Hall, Department of Psychology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803; e-mail: slane@lsu.edu. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 15—Number 11 715 Copyright r 2004 American Psychological Society for a story from the prior study phase. In addition, half of the participants thought aloud during the process of deciding whether they were reminded of a prior analogy (verbalization participants), and half did not. Because it is much more difficult to verbalize the higher-order relations between stories than it is to talk about lower-order relations or object matches (Sieck et al., 1999), we predicted that verbalization would decrease retrievals of true analogies and increase retrievals of mere-appearance matches.