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1. Individual differences in judging similarity between semantic relations

   Ichien, N.; Lu, H.; & Holyoak, K. J. (January 2019, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   The ability to recognize and make inductive inferences based on relational similarity is fundamental to much of human higher cognition. However, relational similarity is not easily defined or measured, which makes it difficult to determine whether individual differences in cognitive capacity or semantic knowledge impact relational processing. In two experiments, we used a multi-arrangement task (previously applied to individual words or objects) to efficiently assess similarities between word pairs instantiating various abstract relations. Experiment 1 established that the method identifies word pairs expressing the same relation as more similar to each other than to those expressing different relations. Experiment 2 extended these results by showing that relational similarity measured by the multi-arrangement task is sensitive to more subtle distinctions. Word pairs instantiating the same specific subrelation were judged as more similar to each other than to those instantiating different subrelations within the same general relation type. In addition, Experiment 2 found that individual differences in both fluid intelligence and crystalized verbal intelligence correlated with differentiation of relation similarity judgments. 

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2. Advancing with age: Older adults excel in comprehension of novel metaphors.

   https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000836  

   Ichien, Nicholas; Stamenković, Dušan; Whatley, Mary C; Castel, Alan D; Holyoak, Keith J (June 2024, Psychology and Aging)

   Older adults may experience certain forms of cognitive decline, but some forms of semantic memory remain intact in older age. To address how metaphor comprehension changes with age and whether metaphor comprehension relies more heavily on analogical reasoning (supported by fluid intelligence) or on conceptual combination (supported by crystalized intelligence), we compared performance of younger and older adults. In two experiments, healthy older adults (54–88 years) scored lower on a measure of fluid intelligence (Ravens Progressive Matrices) but higher on a measure of crystalized intelligence (Mill Hill Vocabulary Test) relative to younger adults (18–34 years). Groups were equally successful in comprehending relatively easy metaphors (Study 1), but older adults showed a striking advantage over younger adults for novel literary metaphors (Study 2). Mixed-effects modeling showed that measures of fluid and crystalized intelligence each made separable contributions to metaphor comprehension for both groups, but older adults relied more on crystalized intelligence than did younger adults. These age-related dissociations clarify cognitive effects of aging and highlight the importance of crystalized intelligence for metaphor comprehension in both younger and older adults. 

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3. Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219414  

   Richland, Lindsey Engle; Zhao, Hongyang (September 2023, Frontiers in Psychology)

   Measurement of the building blocks of everyday thought must capture the range of different ways that humans may train, develop, and use their cognitive resources in real world tasks. Executive function as a construct has been enthusiastically adopted by cognitive and education sciences due to its theorized role as an underpinning of, and constraint on, humans’ accomplishment of complex cognitively demanding tasks in the world, such as identifying problems, reasoning about and executing multi-step solutions while inhibiting prepotent responses or competing desires. As EF measures have been continually refined for increased precision; however, they have also become increasingly dissociated from those everyday accomplishments. We posit three implications of this insight: (1) extant measures of EFs that reduce context actually add an implicit requirement that children reason using abstract rules that are not accomplishing a function in the world, meaning that EF scores may in part reflect experience with formal schooling and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) socialization norms, limiting their ability to predict success in everyday life across contexts, (2) measurement of relational attention and relational reasoning have not received adequate consideration in this context but are highly aligned with the key aims for measuring EFs, and may be more aligned with humans’ everyday cognitive practices, but (3) relational attention and reasoning should be considered alongside rather than as an additional EF as has been suggested, for measurement clarity. 

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4. Bluebell: An Alliance of Relational Lifting and Independence for Probabilistic Reasoning

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3704894  

   Bao, Jialu; D'Osualdo, Emanuele; Farzan, Azadeh (January 2025, Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages)

   We present Bluebell, a program logic for reasoning about probabilistic programs where unary and relational styles of reasoning come together to create new reasoning tools. Unary-style reasoning is very expressive and is powered by foundational mechanisms to reason about probabilistic behavior likeindependenceandconditioning. The relational style of reasoning, on the other hand, naturally shines when the properties of interestcomparethe behavior of similar programs (e.g. when proving differential privacy) managing to avoid having to characterize the output distributions of the individual programs. So far, the two styles of reasoning have largely remained separate in the many program logics designed for the deductive verification of probabilistic programs. In Bluebell, we unify these styles of reasoning through the introduction of a new modality called “joint conditioning” that can encode and illuminate the rich interaction betweenconditional independenceandrelational liftings; the two powerhouses from the two styles of reasoning. 

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5. On the Need to Improve the Way Individual Differences in Cognitive Function Are Measured With Reaction Time Tasks

   https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221077060  

   White, Corey N.; Kitchen, Kiah N. (June 2022, Current Directions in Psychological Science)

   The measurement of individual differences in specific cognitive functions has been an important area of study for decades. Often the goal of such studies is to determine whether there are cognitive deficits or enhancements associated with, for example, a specific population, psychological disorder, health status, or age group. The inherent difficulty, however, is that most cognitive functions are not directly observable, so researchers rely on indirect measures to infer an individual’s functioning. One of the most common approaches is to use a task that is designed to tap into a specific function and to use behavioral measures, such as reaction times (RTs), to assess performance on that task. Although this approach is widespread, it unfortunately is subject to a problem of reverse inference: Differences in a given cognitive function can be manifest as differences in RTs, but that does not guarantee that differences in RTs imply differences in that cognitive function. We illustrate this inference problem with data from a study on aging and lexical processing, highlighting how RTs can lead to erroneous conclusions about processing. Then we discuss how employing choice-RT models to analyze data can improve inference and highlight practical approaches to improving the models and incorporating them into one’s analysis pipeline. 

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