Crystallized
crystallized intelligence
Semantic Distance and Beyond: Interacting Predictors of Verbal Analogy Performance
Prior studies of A:B::C:D verbal analogies have identified several factors that affect performance, including the semantic similarity between source and target domains (semantic distance), the semantic association between the C-term and incorrect answers (distracter salience), and the type of relations between word pairs (e.g., categorical, compositional, and causal). However, it is unclear how these stimulus properties affect performance when utilized together. Moreover, how do these item factors interact with individual differences such as crystallized intelligence and creative thinking? Several studies reveal interactions among these item and individual difference factors impacting verbal analogy performance. For example, a three-way interaction demonstrated that the effects of semantic distance and distracter salience had a greater impact on performance for compositional and causal relations than for categorical ones (Jones, Kmiecik, Irwin, & Morrison, 2022). Implications for analogy theories and future directions are discussed.
Predicting Patterns of Similarity Among Abstract Semantic Relations
In this talk, I will present some data showing that people’s similarity judgments among word pairs reflect distinctions between abstract semantic relations like contrast, cause-effect, or part-whole. Further, the extent that individual participants’ similarity judgments discriminate between abstract semantic relations was linearly associated with both fluid and crystallized verbal intelligence, albeit more strongly with fluid intelligence. Finally, I will compare three models according to their ability to predict these similarity judgments. All models take as input vector representations of individual word meanings, but they differ in their representation of relations: one model does not represent relations at all, a second model represents relations implicitly, and a third model represents relations explicitly. Across the three models, the third model served as the best predictor of human similarity judgments suggesting the importance of explicit relation representation to fully account for human semantic cognition.