Abduction in one intelligence test. Types of reasoning involved in solving raven’s advanced progressive matrices

Abstract

Given that Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) as an intelligence test with robust psychometric properties is considered to be a good measure of reasoning ability component of general intelligence, particularly its fluid factor, one would expect that uncovering the determinants of APM performance, especially reasoning patterns, could significantly contribute to understanding of intelligence. Our aim in this study was to identify types of reasoning processes involved in solving Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices test. To this end we carried out two studies: one involving eliciting verbal protocols in the form of Socratic tutorial dialogues and one involving controlling eye-fixation patterns. Results suggest that hypotheses generation and testing, involved in solving APM tasks, essentially amounts to abductive reasoning.