Fox Mark C, Mitchum Ainsley L
Department of Psychology, University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2014 May 7;9(5):e95780. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0095780. eCollection 2014.
The trend of rising scores on intelligence tests raises important questions about the comparability of variation within and between time periods. Descriptions of the processes that mediate selection of item responses provide meaningful psychological criteria upon which to base such comparisons. In a recent paper, Fox and Mitchum presented and tested a cognitive theory of rising scores on analogical and inductive reasoning tests that is specific enough to make novel predictions about cohort differences in patterns of item responses for tests such as the Raven's Matrices. In this paper we extend the same proposal in two important ways by (1) testing it against a dataset that enables the effects of cohort to be isolated from those of age, and (2) applying it to two other inductive reasoning tests that exhibit large Flynn effects: Letter Series and Word Series. Following specification and testing of a confirmatory item response model, predicted violations of measurement invariance are observed between two age-matched cohorts that are separated by only 20 years, as members of the later cohort are found to map objects at higher levels of abstraction than members of the earlier cohort who possess the same overall level of ability. Results have implications for the Flynn effect and cognitive aging while underscoring the value of establishing psychological criteria for equating members of distinct groups who achieve the same scores.
智力测试分数上升的趋势引发了关于不同时间段内及时间段之间差异可比性的重要问题。对介导项目反应选择过程的描述提供了有意义的心理学标准，可据此进行此类比较。在最近的一篇论文中，福克斯和米查姆提出并测试了一种关于类比和归纳推理测试分数上升的认知理论，该理论足够具体，能够对诸如瑞文推理测验等测试中不同队列在项目反应模式上的差异做出新颖的预测。在本文中，我们通过以下两种重要方式扩展了相同的提议：（1）针对一个能够将队列效应与年龄效应分离的数据集对其进行测试；（2）将其应用于另外两项呈现出大幅弗林效应的归纳推理测试：字母系列和单词系列。在对一个验证性项目反应模型进行设定和测试之后，我们观察到在仅相隔20年的两个年龄匹配队列之间存在预测的测量不变性违反情况，因为发现后一个队列的成员比具有相同总体能力水平的前一个队列的成员在更高的抽象层次上对物体进行映射。研究结果对弗林效应和认知老化具有启示意义，同时强调了为使获得相同分数的不同群体成员具有可比性而建立心理学标准的价值。
