Mapping Mental Representations With Free Associations: A Tutorial Using the R Package associatoR

People's understanding of topics and concepts such as risk, sustainability, and intelligence can be important for psychological researchers and policymakers alike. One underexplored way of accessing this information is to use free associations to map people's mental representations. In thi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of cognition Vol. 8; no. 1; p. 3
Main Authors Aeschbach, Samuel, Mata, Rui, Wulff, Dirk U.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published England Ubiquity Press 06.01.2025
Subjects
free association
generative ai
intelligence
mental representations
r package
mental representations
generative AI
R package
free association
intelligence
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Summary:People's understanding of topics and concepts such as risk, sustainability, and intelligence can be important for psychological researchers and policymakers alike. One underexplored way of accessing this information is to use free associations to map people's mental representations. In this tutorial, we describe how free association responses can be collected, processed, mapped, and compared across groups using the R package . We discuss study design choices and different approaches to uncovering the structure of mental representations using natural language processing, including the use of embeddings from large language models. We posit that free association analysis presents a powerful approach to revealing how people and machines represent key social and technological issues.
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ISSN:2514-4820
2514-4820
DOI:10.5334/joc.407