Generation speed in Raven's progressive matrices test
Section snippets
Generation Speed
A typical APM item is given in Fig. 1; participants are instructed to complete the lower right-hand cell of the 3×3 matrix with one of the eight answer alternatives at the bottom. They are told to find a logical rule governing the first as well as the second row of this matrix; once found, this rule has to be applied to row three in order to complete the item.
Essentially, the thesis of this paper is that a rule generation process plays a crucial role in solving the APM items. If (APM) rules are
Hypothesis One
Testing of the quantitative differences hypothesis is done using a randomized blocks ANOVA design: each participant is treated as its own block, the five items are treated as the experimental conditions. Contrary to usual practice, no prediction is made about the experimental variable, but a strong effect is predicted for the blocking variable. It is useful to note at this point the relation between this procedure and a classical way to calculate test reliability based on ANOVA methods (Hoyt,
Participants
Participants are 127 undergraduate psychology students of Leuven university who received course credit for their participation. Of the 82% of participants of whom sex is known (they were allowed to use an alias), 18% are male.
Procedure
In the first session, the APM test was taken, for which 40 min were allowed. One week later came, the second session in which the generation task was administered. In the instructions, participants are encouraged to give as many rules as possible for each item. Here, a 20
Results
The generation task and the APM test have a split-half reliability of 0.86 and 0.80, respectively. The generation task has an interrater reliability of 0.90. Other reliabilities will be mentioned throughout the text.
Discussion
In the past, solving analogy problems (like the APM items) has been the focus of a wide array of research. One line of research has stressed the importance of working memory capacity (e.g., Kyllonen and Christal, 1990, Mulholland et al., 1980, Simon and Kotovsky, 1963. Others have argued for the importance of metacognition or control processes Embretson, 1995, Sternberg, 1985. Some authors have constructed new Raven-type items in order to facilitate model testing Embretson, 1995, Hornke and
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Siegfried Dewitte, Michel Meulders, Gert Storms, Francis Tuerlinckx and Iven Van Mechelen for their fluency in providing many useful comments.
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2015, IntelligenceCitation Excerpt :A human being who has never encountered the problems before has to come up with an idea about how to approach the problem in the first place. Verguts, De Boeck, and Maris (1999) describe this step like sampling rules from an urn until all element relations in the problem can be accounted for. We asked ourselves: What would happen if the set size of the urn would be reduced to the number of rules that are actually applicable to the problems?
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2011, CognitionCitation Excerpt :The stimulus was presented until the participant responded or until 50 s had elapsed, and then we provided the correct/incorrect feedback. The performance in Phase 2, namely the number of trials required for rule finding, served as the dependent measure indicating difficulty in rule finding (Heaton & Pendleton, 1981; Schwartz, 1982; Verguts, De-Boeck, & Maris, 1999). Because the results were essentially the same for the number of trials needed to find the solution as for the time taken until the solution was found, we decided to report only the number of trials.
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2011, IntelligenceCitation Excerpt :Individual differences in reasoning speed can be expected in several respects. First, individuals taking exactly the same processing steps may differ in their general processing speed which affects the time needed across the various stages of the reasoning process; for instance, in APM tasks one important aspect of speed is rule generation speed (Verguts, De Boeck, & Maris, 1999). This general source of individual differences in response times is reflected by Roberts and Stankov's (1999) Psychometric speed factor which also explains Induction speed.