A preliminary study of distinctive features in problem solving

The abstract logical structure of family relationship problems, such as, “What relationship to a man is his mother's father?” was described in terms of a “distinctive-feature-transition count (dft)”, where the answer to the problem was characterized in terms of the distinctive features of descendancy, co-linearity, and sex. On average, it proved possible to predict the difficulty of such problems from such a count; thus tending to support the idea of a relational rather than an associative memory structure.