Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of content abstractness (Experiment 1) and solution complexity(Experiment 2) for connecting principled information and worked examples. College students who had not learned theselected statistical distribution studied the principled information and two examples. In Experiment 1, the participantscompleted tasks for principle-example mapping and example-example mapping. Overall, their performance inprinciple-example mapping was lower than that in example-example mapping. They also committed more one-to-manyerrors and mapped fewer parallel contents and more nonparallel contents in principle-example mapping in comparison withthose in example-example mapping. However, these effects were weaker when one example in the example-example pair was relatively complex. In Experiment 2, the participants completed tasks for principle-simple example mapping and principle-complex example mapping. Their performance in principle–complex example mapping was lower than that in principle-simple example mapping. In addition, the participants made more one-to-many errors and mapped fewer parallel elements and slightly more nonparallel elements. This study adds direct evidence to the research literature concerning the process of connecting a principle to its example. Abstractness causes principle-example mapping difficulty but not example-example mapping difficulty. Because a general element in the principle may be mapped onto several possible candidates in the example, mapping of corresponding elements between the principle and example is less accurate. However, principle-example mapping provides learners an opportunity to examine elements not demonstrated in the examples, and such learning tends to be more accurate in comparison to example-example mapping. Furthermore, pairing a simple example with the principle appears to facilitate learning of the parallel content, whereas pairing a complex example with the principle tends to promote learning of the nonparallel content. The implications of these findings are discussed.