Which chc abilities are involved in composing metaphors?

An interesting paper:


Metaphorically speaking: cognitive abilities
and the production of figurative language
Roger E. Beaty & Paul J. Silvia

Mem Cogn (2013) 41:255–267
DOI 10.3758/s13421-012-0258-5

free online.

The authors asked university students to compose 2 kinds of metaphors: conventional (“Come up with a metaphor that conveys that some jobs are confining and constraining, and make you feel like you are just putting in time” -  "some jobs are like jails") or creative  ("think of the most boring class you've ever had.  What was it like to sit through?"  In this task the students were asked to come up with the most creative metaphors they can).  The students also took tests that measured fluid ability and executive functions, crystallized ability, long term memory retrieval, and BIG 5 personality factors.  The results showed that openness to experience had a substantial effect on creative metaphor quality.   While crystallized ability predicted performance on the conventional metaphor task, executive functioning, fluid ability and long term retrieval predicted performance on the creative metaphor task.

An interesting thing is that one of the tasks the authors used to measure fluid ability was a paper folding task.  Each item in this task presented a square piece of paper followed by a series of images that represented the paper being folded and punched with holes. Participants were to imagine the paper being unfolded and determine the final state of the paper from a series of answer choices.

I think this task has a high loading on visual spatial processing.  It's reasonable to assume that this ability is also involved in creative metaphor generation, as the person might "see" the  metaphorical situation  with the mind's eye and use the image to judge it's creative quality ("as boring as the life of an old fat dog in a good family").