Learning from examples: case-based reasoning in chess for novices

Can an example be understood and reused to solve a new problem without reso rting to an abstract representation? Two studies, with novices in the game of chess, investigate the existence of a process of reasoning by analogy th at does not require the mediation of an abstract schema. In the first exper iment, subjects analyze chess problem examples and then solve similar probl ems. The results showed that during transfer, subjects use knowledge that h as a very low degree of abstraction: they only succeed on problems similar to the examples when they are perceptually close. Experiment 2 investigates the role of failure in analogical transfer. From the results it seems that attempting to solve the source problem is a determinant in case-based reas oning.