The story-mapping study explored how analogical mapping iteracts with low-level, general problem-solving skills. In the study, subjects read two stories and mapped the characters in the source story to analogous characters in the target story. Subjects' eye-movement and typing behavior were recorded and analyzed in conjunction with their mapping choices. The study manifested a number of interesting results, including the fact that subjects sometimes did not read the stories entirely before mapping and that adjacency of similar relations significantly affected both correctness and mapping times.
The story-mapping model simulates subject behavior and makes fine-grain predictions concerning correctness, latency, eye movements, and typing. The results confirm that the path-mapping theory not only can account for subject correctness and latency behavior in story mapping, but also can account for how subjects integrate the mapping process with other skills (e.g., encoding and responding) necessary for successful problem solving.