Modeling the Remote Associates Test as Retrievals from Semantic Memory

• Published in: Cognitive science Vol. 46; no. 6; pp. e13145 - n/a
• Main Authors: Schatz, Jule, Jones, Steven J., Laird, John E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Wiley 01.06.2022; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc; John Wiley and Sons Inc
• Subjects: Association Measures; Associative Learning; Cognitive ability; Cognitive architecture; Cognitive modeling; Cognitive Processes; Computation; Computer applications; Difficulty Level; Humans; Knowledge; Long Term Memory; Memory; Memory, Long-Term; Prior Learning; Problem Solving; Prompting; Recall (Psychology); Regular; Remote Associates Test; Semantic memory; Semantics; Task Analysis; Cognitive architecture; Cognitive modeling; Semantic memory; Remote Associates Test
• ISSN: 0364-0213; 1551-6709; 1551-6709
• DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13145

The Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a word association retrieval task that consists of a series of problems, each with three seemingly unrelated prompt words. The subject is asked to produce a single word that is related to all three prompt words. In this paper, we provide support for a theory in which the RAT assesses a person's ability to retrieve relevant word associations from long‐term memory. We present a computational model of humans solving the RAT and investigate how prior knowledge and memory retrieval mechanisms influence the model's ability to match human behavior. We expand prior modeling attempts by investigating multiple large knowledge bases and by creating a cognitive process model that uses long‐term memory spreading activation retrieval processes inspired by ACT‐R and implemented in Soar. We evaluate multiple model variants for their ability to model human problem difficulty, including the incorporation of noise and base‐level activation into memory retrieval. We conclude that the main factors affecting human difficulty are the existence of associations between prompt words and solutions, the relative strengths and directions of those associations compared to associations to other words, and the ability to perform multiple retrievals.