Incidental information processing and verbal intelligence

Abstract

This article aims to reveal interaction between verbal intelligence and efficiency of intentional and incidental verbal information processing. Participants were exposed to pairs of words about which they have to decide whether a city name was presented in each pair. Thus, semantics of words was processed intentionally, whereas their phonemic features (rhymed vs. unrhymed pairs) were processed incidentally. The efficiency of stimuli processing was estimated in two different cognitive tasks – word free-recall task and word usage in new creative task. It was found that verbal intelligence was positively correlated with number of recalled stimuli which were congruent to both intentional and incidental processing conditions. Moreover, verbal intelligence was positively correlated with usage of incongruent stimuli which were processed incidentally in creative task. The results are discussed in terms of contemporary frameworks of information processing in verbal tasks.