The effect of different types of perceptual manipulations on the dimensionality of automatically generated figural matrices

Two pilot studies (n1 = 155, n2 = 451) are presented in this article, which were carried out within the development of an item generator for the automatic generation of figural matrices items. The focus of the presented studies was to compare two types of item designs with regard to the effect of variations of the property “perceptual organization” on the psychometric properties and concurrent validity of figural matrices. The main results not only indicate a comparably high concurrent validity of the automatically generated figural matrices with regard to Raven matrices but also point to interesting differential effects of two kinds of implementations of perceptual organization. The conclusion of the two studies is that a more thorough understanding of the component processes of inductive reasoning and especially the impact of various item features on their difficulty and psychometric properties must be obtained.