Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Three leading analogical reasoning paradigms: scene analogies and pictorial A:B::C:D analogies (both semantically-rich) and geometric analogies (semantically-lean) were solved by 251 participants. Pictorial analogies included four types of lures among the response options (perceptual, categorical, semantic, relational). Moreover, distractors related to both B and C were introduced. Additionally, a fluid intelligence test was applied to examine the relationship between the paradigms and general reasoning ability. Results indicated that: (a) objects semantically related to C yielded the strongest distraction in four-term analogies, categorical and relational distractors yielded moderate effects, perceptual distraction was negligible; (b) distractors related to B were relatively easy to ignore, suggesting that C is the primary object of reference during the response selection; (c) whilst the three tasks correlated significantly without control for fluid intelligence, only the semantically-rich tasks did after fluid intelligence was accounted for, suggesting a certain common mechanism, independent of fluid intelligence, underlying the two.