When Lighting a Candle Becomes a Superstition: Analogical Recategorization through the Application of Relational Categories
Nicolás Oberholzer, Máximo Trench, Ricardo Adrián Minervino · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2011
In this paper we proposed a new classification of analogical mechanisms of representational change and gathered evidence of the operation of one of the new ones that we proposed: recategorization of events.We carried out two experiments to assess whether an analogy can trigger the recategorization of a target analog (TA).More specifically, the experiments were designed to test whether a TA not initially regarded as a member of a schema relational category can be perceived as belonging to such category as a result of being paired with a base analog (BA) consisting of a typical exemplar of that category.Results in both experiments showed that having paired an atypical TA with a typical BA favored the use of the base category to describe the TA.Implications for traditional and future proposals of mechanisms of analogical representation change are discussed.