ABSTRACT
Previous research has linked the presence of higher-order relations to judgments of similarity (Gentner, 1989). Other research has drawn distinctions between differences linked to commonalities, termed alignable differences, and differences not connected to commonalities, termed non-alignable differences (Gentner & Markman, 1994). The purpose of this paper is integrate these findings into a model which explains encoding status decisions. An encoding status decision entails categorizing entities as either not analogous (containing few similarities), partially analogous (containing moderate numbers of similarities), or analogous (containing high numbers of similarities).
