To understand and aa upon new experiences, people may draw on specific past experiences. Analogical transfer models suggest that past experiences are used following the encoding of the new information. Research on reminding s suggests that specific experiences may be accessed during encoding, and text comprehension research suggests available information may be used to interpret incoming material. Together, these findings suggest a more dynamic organization of interpretation processes, where past experiences may be accessed and used during encoding. This paper repeats on two experiments that explore the relationship between reminding and interpretation. In particular, the question was whether remindings that occur early during encoding might bias later interpretation. The first experiment used a postprocessing measure of interpretation, while the second measured on-line sentence reading times. In contrast to most contemporary models of analogical transfer, we found that remindings m a y influence interpretation during encoding.

In many domains, the content of a problem (i.e., its surface cover story) provides useful clues as to the type of problem it is and its solution. Three experiments examined this role of problem content on the problem categorization and solution of algebra word problems with experienced subjects, by manipulating only the content of the problems. When a problem's content was highly correlated with its deep structure (e.g., a content of cars driving for a distance-timerate problem), people were able to categorize the problem after seeing a smaller portion of it compared to a baseline with contents uncorrelated to the problem deep structure. In addition, for more complex problems in which irrelevant information had been added, problem solving performance was higher and people showed greater sensitivity to the relevance of the information. When a problem's content suggested a different (inappropriate) type of problem, people required a greater part of the problem to categorize it and were slower and less accurate at solving the problem. These results suggest that content may be influential even for experienced problem solvers.