Skimming the surface verbal overshadowing of analogical retrieval

ABSTRACT—It has become almost a maxim that ‘‘talking through’ ’ a problem is advantageous. Contrary to this wisdom, studies from numerous domains have demon-strated that describing one’s thought processes or ana-lyzing a judgment may, in some circumstances, actually impair performance. The two experiments reported here built upon prior work by examining the effect of verbali-zation 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