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Insight with hands and things
Abstract
Two experiments examined whether different task ecologies influenced insight problem solving. The 17 animals problem was employed, a pure insight problem. Its initial formulation encourages the application of a direct arithmetic solution, but its solution requires the spatial arrangement of sets involving some degree of overlap. Participants were randomly allocated to either a tablet condition where they could use a stylus and an electronic tablet to sketch a solution or a model building condition where participants were given material with which to build enclosures and figurines. In both experiments, participants were much more likely to develop a working solution in the model building condition. The difference in performance elicited by different task ecologies was unrelated to individual differences in working memory, actively open-minded thinking, or need for cognition (Experiment 1), although individual differences in creativity were correlated with problem solving success in Experiment 2. The discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for the prevailing metatheoretical commitment to methodological individualism that places the individual as the ontological locus of cognition.
... Although external cognitive operations have recently been investigated in perception, attention, memory, numerical and spatial cognition [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] , so far, they remain relatively unexplored in fluid intelligence 34 . To address this, we designed a click-and-drag version of one of the most common and popular intelligence quotient (IQ) tests across the lifespan: the non-verbal Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices test for fluid intelligence 26 (Fig. 1b). ...
... NATuRe HuMAN BeHAvIOuR intention offloading task that allowed the externalization of cognitive operations was a better predictor of real-world intention fulfilment than a task that did not 28 . Also, participants tend to persevere less with suboptimal, idiosyncratic, task-specific strategies in paradigms that allows cognitive operations to be externalized [29][30][31] , which may increase the generalizability of task outcomes. ...
... Our study supports the emerging view that much of what matters about human intelligence is hidden not in the brain, nor in external technology, but lies in the delicate and iterated coupling between the two 17-25,37,38 . methods No statistical methods were used to determine sample size but our sample sizes are similar to those reported in previous publications [4][5][6]15,27,[29][30][31][32] . The assignment of participants to between-subjects conditions (click-and-drag versus static Raven task) was randomized and was not blinded to investigators. ...
Humans are nature’s most intelligent and prolific users of external props and aids (such as written texts, slide-rules and software packages). Here we introduce a method for investigating how people make active use of their task environment during problem-solving and apply this approach to the non-verbal Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices test for fluid intelligence. We designed a click-and-drag version of the Raven test in which participants could create different external spatial configurations while solving the puzzles. In our first study, we observed that the click-and-drag test was better than the conventional static test at predicting academic achievement of university students. This pattern of results was partially replicated in a novel sample. Importantly, environment-altering actions were clustered in between periods of apparent inactivity, suggesting that problem-solvers were delicately balancing the execution of internal and external cognitive operations. We observed a systematic relationship between this critical phasic temporal signature and improved test performance. Our approach is widely applicable and offers an opportunity to quantitatively assess a powerful, although understudied, feature of human intelligence: our ability to use external objects, props and aids to solve complex problems.
... The results in the present study were in line with other results showing that interaction with artefacts enhances problem-solving success (Fioratou & Cowley, 2009;Vallée-Tourangeau, et al., 2015;Vallée-Tourangeau et al., 2016b). The performance in the present experiments were considerably higher than those reported by Fioratou and Cowley (2009). ...
... DeCaro, Van Stockum, & Wieth, 2016), and more important, previous work that explored problem solving in a highinteractivity task environment found no association between working memory scores and solution rates with a so-called insight problem (e.g. Vallée-Tourangeau et al., 2016b). ...
Insight is commonly viewed as originating from the restructuring of a mental representation. Distributed cognition frameworks such as the Systemic Thinking Model (SysTM, Vallée-Tourangeau and Vallée-Tourangeau, Cognition beyond the brain: interactivity and human thinking, pp 133–154, 2017), however, assumes that information processing can be transformed when it is distributed across mental and material resources. The experiments reported here investigated whether interactivity enhanced incubation effects with the cheap necklace problem. Participants attempted to solve the problem in a low-interactivity condition with pen and paper or in a high-interactivity condition with a set of metal chains. Performance was substantially better in a task environment that fostered a higher degree of interactivity at Time 1. There was evidence of an incubation effect as participants significantly improved in performance after a 2-week gap, particularly in the high-interactivity condition. Experiment 2 showed that the context within which people can enact their thinking following incubation is key to improve problem-solving performance. When the problem presentation changed after a 2-week gap (low interactivity to high interactivity or high interactivity to low interactivity), performance only improved for those who worked on a highly interactive task at Time 2. Taken together, these findings underscore the importance of adopting a systemic perspective when investigating incubation effects in problem solving.
... Furthermore, there is evidence that tangible interfaces promote user engagement and immersion into the scenario or problem [21]. Finally, for some problems, participants are more likely to find a solution to a problem when using a tangible interface compared to a tablet [22]. ...
... The results were clear. 41% of the participants in the pipe cleaners condition found a full or a partial solution to the problem, while none of the participants in the tablet condition solved the problem (Vallée-Tourangeau, Steffensen, Vallée-Tourangeau, & Sirota, 2016). The authors trace this difference to the materiality of the problem presentation. ...
We discuss a suggestion, made by Harry Heft, that Gibson's ecological approach to perception is compatible with the theory of distributed cognition. We focus on the domain of problem solving. We provide examples of problems in which perception plays a constitutive role in the finding of a solution. We conclude that grounding distributed cognition theory in Gibson's account of direct perception offers a promising avenue for future work seeking to understand human behavior across social and higher cognitive domains.
... and excellent test-retest reliability (r = .89). Further studies have supported these findings (Firouzian et al., 2015;Vallée-Tourangeau et al., 2016). ...
Maths anxiety is common and refers to feelings of anxiety, fear and other negative emotions and thoughts in individuals when confronted with mathematical tasks or numerical information. Self-report measures of maths anxiety have been created, but the majority are in English and are not culturally relevant to all countries. This study aimed to translate and validate existing measures for future use in Hebrew-speaking adult populations. The Mathematics Anxiety Scale-UK (MAS-UK) was translated to Hebrew and adult participants completed it alongside the Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale-Revised (MARS-R) and a general anxiety measure. Factor structures were explored for both the translated MAS-UK and a Hebrew version of the MARS-R, as well as being checked for reliability and convergent and discriminant validity. Results from a final sample of 213 participants, indicated the shortened, Hebrew version of the MAS-UK and the MARS-R are internally consistent and suitable for use in future maths anxiety research in adult Israeli populations. Findings regarding sex differences in maths anxiety are also discussed.
... Handwritten notes, and the physical embodiment that they afford, have been shown to improve the retention of lecture material [Morehead et al. 2019;Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014], be a critical component of the design process [Suwa and Tversky 2002], as well as allow for the benefits of nonlinear thinking [Makany et al. 2009]. Making handwritten notes more interactive, by giving them the editing capabilities that computers allow, may allow handwritten notes to take on the power currently only seen when working with 3D, physical objects, which has been shown to increase people's causal reasoning [Vallée-Tourangeau et al. 2015] and improve their ability to solve insight problems [Vallée-Tourangeau et al. 2016]. ...
Handwriting recognition is improving in leaps and bounds, and this opens up new opportunities for stylus-based interactions. In particular, note-taking applications can become a more intelligent user interface, incorporating new features like autocomplete and integrated search. In this work we ran a gesture elicitation study, asking 21 participants to imagine how they would interact with an imaginary, intelligent note-taking application. We report agreement on the elicited gestures, finding that while existing common interactions are prevalent (like double taps and long presses) a number of more novel interactions (like dragging selected items to hotspots or using annotations) were also well-represented. We discuss the mental models participants drew on when explaining their gestures and what kind of feedback users might need to move to more stylus-centric interactions.
... Solutions to problems, discoveries, new ideas, and so on, could not come into being without such manipulations. It has been shown that insights leading to problem-solving are strictly dependent on the physical manipulation of the task environment and that the effectiveness of such insights increases with the degree of embodiment of the manipulation (see Vallée-Tourangeau et al., 2016). Real world examples of the fundamental role of manipulation are ubiquitous. ...
Innovations advance into the ‘adjacent possible’, enabled and constrained by the current state of the world, in a way that is unpredictable and not law-entailed. Unpredictability is the hallmark of the idea that innovation processes are contingent and embodied in the interaction between individuals and artefacts in the environment. In this chapter, we explore the cognitive and behavioural factors involved in exaptive innovation processes by using the notion of ‘extended cognition’. Extended cognition builds on the hypothesis that cognitive processes are not limited to the brain but also extend into the physical world as the objects of the environment facilitate, integrate with, and even constitute specific cognitive processes. We argue that exaptive innovations can be better understood by focusing on practicality and procedural knowledge from an extended cognition perspective. Artefact manipulation is not merely pragmatic but also epistemic as it enables specific reasoning processes that lead to the discovery of new uses.
... and excellent test-retest reliability (r = .89). Further studies have supported these findings (Firouzian et al., 2015;Vallée-Tourangeau et al., 2016). ...
Maths anxiety is common and refers to feelings of anxiety, fear and other negative emotions and thoughts in individuals when confronted with mathematical tasks or numerical information. Self-report measures of maths anxiety have been created, but the majority are in English and are not culturally relevant to all countries. This study aimed to translate and validate existing measures for future use in Hebrew-speaking adult populations. The Mathematics Anxiety Scale - UK (MAS-UK) was translated to Hebrew and adult participants completed it alongside the Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale - Revised (MARS-R) and a general anxiety measure. Factor structures were explored for both the translated MAS-UK and a Hebrew version of the MARS-R, as well as being checked for reliability and convergent and discriminant validity. Results from a final sample of 213 participants, indicated the shortened, Hebrew version of the MAS-UK and the MARS-R are internally consistent and suitable for use in future maths anxiety research in adult Israeli populations. Findings regarding sex differences in maths anxiety are also discussed.
... There are empirical studies that try to assess the impact of external objects on cognitive processing (e.g. Vallé-Tourangeau et al. 2016;Bocanegra et al . 2019), and these studies can be used to offer empirical support to vehicle externalism. ...
Consciousness vehicle externalism (CVE) is the claim that the material machinery of a subject’s phenomenology partially leaks outside a subject’s brain, encompassing bodily and environmental structures. The DEUTS argument is the most prominent argument for CVE in the sensorimotor enactivists’ arsenal. In a recent series of publications, Kirchhoff and Kiverstein have deployed such an argument to claim that a prominent view of neural processing, namely predictive processing, is fully compatible with CVE. Indeed, in Kirchhoff and Kiverstein’s view, a proper understanding of predictive processing mandates CVE. In this essay, we critically examine Kirchhoff and Kiverstein’s argument. Our aim is to argue in favor of the following three points. First, that Kirchhoff and Kiverstein’s emphasis on cultural practices lends no support to CVE: at best, it vindicates some form of content externalism about phenomenal content. Secondly, the criteria Kirchhoff and Kiverstein propose to identify a subject’s phenomenal machinery greatly overgeneralize, leaving them open to a “consciousness bloat” objection, which is an analog of the cognitive bloat objection against the extended mind. Lastly, we will argue that the “consciousness bloat” problem is inbuilt in the very argumentative structure of the DEUTS argument. We will thus conclude that, contrary to the philosophical mainstream, DEUTS is not the best argument for CVE in the sensorimotor enactivists’ argumentative arsenal.
... Before we begin, it should be noted that several authors who work in embodied and enactive cognitive science, as well as ecological dynamics and distributed cognition, have written on creative processes (see e.g., Hristovski et al., 2011;Vallee-Tourangeau and Vallee-Tourangeau, 2014;Vallee-Tourangeau et al., 2016;Torrance and Schumann, 2019). However, as Malinin (2019) argues "there is [still] minimal evidence of embodied cognition approaches in creativity research or pedagogical practices for teaching creativity skills." ...
Current literature on creative cognition has developed rich conceptual landscapes dedicated to the analysis of both individual and collective forms of creativity. This work has favored the emergence of unifying theories on domain-general creative abilities in which the main experiential, behavioral, computational, and neural aspects involved in everyday creativity are examined and discussed. But while such accounts have gained important analytical leverage for describing the overall conditions and mechanisms through which creativity emerges and operates, they necessarily leave contextual forms of creativity less explored. Among the latter, musical practices have recently drawn the attention of scholars interested in its creative properties as well as in the creative potential of those who engage with them. In the present article, we compare previously posed theories of creativity in musical and non-musical domains to lay the basis of a conceptual framework that mitigates the tension between (i) individual and collective and (ii) domain-general and domain-specific perspectives on creativity. In doing so, we draw from a range of scholarship in music and enactive cognitive science, and propose that creative cognition may be best understood as a process of skillful organism-environment adaptation that one cultivates endlessly. With its focus on embodiment, plurality, and adaptiveness, our account points to a structured unity between living systems and their world, disclosing a variety of novel analytical resources for research and theory across different dimensions of (musical) creativity.
... Much of the experimental literature examining problem solving in a situated and movable environment has concentrated on the scaffolding benefits of externalising and reifying representations (e.g., Vallée-Tourangeau, Steffensen, Vallée-Tourangeau, & Sirota, 2016). However, for Maglio et al. (1999) the benefit of high interactivity was in no small part due to the introduction of randomness supporting intelligent behaviour. ...
Problem solving outside of the cognitive psychologist’s lab unfolds in an environment rich with bodily gesture and material artefacts. We examine this meshwork of internal mental resources, embodied actions and environmental affordances through the lens of a word production task with letter tiles. Forty participants took part in the study which contrasted performance in a high interactivity condition (where participants were able to move letter tiles at will), a low interactivity condition (where movements were restrained) and a shuffle condition (where participants could not move the tiles but were allowed to randomly rearrange the array). Participants were also video recorded to facilitate coding of behaviour. While aggregate performance measures revealed a marginal impact of interactivity on performance, when the participants’ behaviour was taken into account, interactivity had a consistent and statistically significant beneficial effect. Detailed, exploratory examination of a subsample of participants informed the formulation of additional hypotheses tested across the full sample: the luckiness of the shuffle in that condition significantly predicted the number of words produced and a more efficient strategy was significantly easier to enact in the high interactivity condition. Additionally, two detailed case studies revealed several moments when accidental changes to the letter tile array offered unplanned words reflecting a serendipitous coagency as well as many moments when environmental chance was ignored. These data and observations indicate that interactivity, serendipity, and internal cognitive resources determine problem-solving performance in this task.
... However, analogy problem solving is a highly constrained task with a single correct solution, and one could argue that this is uncharacteristic of most creative tasks. Moreover, it has been argued that classic insight problems such as this divorce the task from the solver's real-world context because they do not require interaction with an object (Vallée-Tourangeau, Steffensen, Vallée-Tourangeau, and Sirota, 2016). The goal of Study 2 was to test this hypothesis using a less constrained, open-ended task. ...
Creative thought is conventionally believed to involve searching memory and generating multiple independent candidate ideas followed by selection and refinement of the most promising. Honing theory, which grew out of the quantum approach to describing how concepts interact, posits that what appears to be discrete, separate ideas are actually different projections of the same underlying mental representation, which can be described as a superposition state, and which may take different outward forms when reflected upon from different perspectives. As creative thought proceeds, this representation loses potentiality to be viewed from different perspectives and manifest as different outcomes. Honing theory yields different predictions from conventional theories about the mental representation of an idea midway through the creative process. These predictions were pitted against one another in two studies: one closed-ended and one open-ended. In the first study, participants were interrupted midway through solving an analogy problem and wrote down what they were thinking in terms of a solution. In the second, participants were instructed to create a painting that expressed their true essence and describe how they conceived of the painting. For both studies, na\"ive judges categorized these responses as supportive of either the conventional view or the honing theory view. The results of both studies were significantly more consistent with the predictions of honing theory. Some implications for creative cognition, and cognition in general, are discussed.
... Embodied cognition approaches to problem solving (cf. Glenberg, 2015;Vallée-Tourangeau et al., 2016) are rather enactive in the sense of Bruner, but not necessarily enactivist. Enactivist approaches are deeper in a sense, involving the co-construction of problems and questions, eventually triggered by a situational seed. ...
We are interested in exploring and developing an enactivist approach to problem posing and problem solving. We use here the term “enactivist approach” to refer to Varela’s radically nonrepresentationalist and pioneering “enactive approach to cognition” (Varela et al., The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), to avoid confusion with the enactive mode of representation of Bruner, which is still compatible with a representationalist view of cognition. In this approach, problems are not standing “out there” waiting to be solved, by a solver equipped with a suitable toolbox of strategies. They are instead co-constructed through the interaction of a cognitive agent and a milieu, in a circular process well described by the metaphor of the Ouroboros (the snake eating its own tail). Also, cognition as enaction is metaphorized by Varela as “lying down a path in walking.” In this vein, we present here some paradigmatic examples of enactivist, and metaphorical, approaches to problem solving and problem posing, involving geometry, algebra, and probability, drawn from our didactical experimenting with a broad spectrum of learners, which includes humanities-inclined university students as well as prospective and in-service maths teachers. Our examples may be metaphorized as cognitive random walks in the classroom, stemming and unfolding from a situational seed.
... In Experiment 2, although the problems were applied sequentially, they were presented on a computer screen. As such a static presentation format strongly hinders insight, in contrast to situations when participants are allowed to draw or manipulate the problem elements (Fioratou & Cowley, 2009;Vallee-Tourangeau, Steffensen, Vallee-Tourangeau, & Sirota, 2016;Weller, Villejoubert, & Vallee-Tourangeau, 2011), the computer format used in Experiment 2 might be one cause of the extremely low problem-solving accuracy. Additionally, the dual task to selfmonitor one's own cognitive processing was imposed (pressing the spacebar when an impasse was encountered during the solution process), which might have also hindered participants' insight. ...
Recently, DeCaro and Van Stockum have suggested that ego depletion following intensive self-control can improve insight problem-solving; this finding was interpreted in terms of insight relying on decreased control over attention and memory. However, DeCaro and Van Stockum used three variants of the single matchstick arithmetic problem. Experiment 1 involved low sample and non-standard problem application, while the more powered Experiment 2 yielded a surprisingly low solution rate. These facts made both studies problematic and called for their replication. In the two present studies, the DeCaro and Van Stockum ego-depletion manipulation and their matchstick problems were administered to a total of 316 people. Furthermore, various other insight problems, subjective ratings of insight experience, analytical problems and executive control tests were applied. The key result was that no reliable effect of ego depletion could be found for any of these measures.
... Vallée-Tourangeau, Steffensen, Vallée-Tourangeau, and Sirota (2016) claim that in contrast to our common conception of the mind as a computer, we actually 'live through' a situation while we think: when we problem solve, we engage with artefacts and manipulate them to enhance and transform our ability to think and explain ourselves. To illustrate the point, the authors offer an example of how we play Scrabble: we naturally touch, move, and re-arrange the tiles we receive. ...
Our rising life expectancy mandates a re-design of our life span and redefines ‘midlife’ both technically and conceptually. Lagging behind other life stages in its scientific study, midlife is often connoted with a ‘crisis’ of sorts. Yet historically, midlife represented an apex in life; moreover, conclusive ‘crisis’ evidence has yet to emerge. Some manage to thrive in midlife by maintaining an attitude rooted in The Good Life, a concept tracing back to Aristotelian ethics. Positive psychology, the science of what makes life worth living, has studied The Good Life in modern times and contributed to understanding midlife in well-being terms. Together with neuroscience, positive psychology can help dispel myths regarding midlife, reframing it from the onset of decline into a creative transition for our ‘second act’ based on an enhanced sense of authorship. This self-creation process involves three key well-being themes: revision, prospection, and individuation. Reviewing these themes and ‘layering’ them with different well-being perspectives relevant to midlife, we may achieve meaningful positive psychological constructs and activities (and eventually, interventions) in three areas: positive narrative identity, serious play, and self-regulation. Of these, serious play, which unlocks the tacit knowledge our bodies disseminate in a state of play, seems especially key to enhancing authorship. One serious play application, LEGO Serious Play, which aims to build identities trough metaphors, seems especially promising for enhancing well-being at midlife in positive psychology workshops.
... Taken together, the theorizing and empirical evidence suggest that embodied movements and interaction have an influence on problem solving and team collaboration. This assertion draws from early social cybernetic theory (e.g., Henning et al., 2001;Sauter and Smith, 1971) as well as more recent theorizing on individual and team cognition (Cooke et al., 2013;Fiore et al., 2010;Thomas and Lleras, 2009;Vallée-Tourangeau et al., 2016). At issue is that the specific ways in which coordination functions during CPS is not well studied. ...
During collaborative problem solving (CPS), coordination occurs at different spatial and temporal scales. This multiscale coordination should play a functional role in facilitating effective collaboration. To evaluate this, we conducted a study of computer-based CPS with 42 dyadic teams. We used cross-wavelet coherence to examine movement coordination, extracted from videos, at several scales, and tested whether the observed coordination was greater than expected due to chance and due to task demands. We found that coordination at scales less than 2s was greater than chance and at most scales (except 16s, 1m, and 2m), was greater than expected due to task demands. Lastly, we observed that coherence at .25s and 1s scales was predictive of performance. However, when including relative phase, our results suggest that higher in-phase movement coordination at the 1s scale was the strongest predictor of CPS performance. Further, we used growth curve modeling to examine how movement coordination changes across the duration of the task and whether this is moderated by CPS performance. We found that coordination over the duration of the CPS task is quadratic (a U shape) and that better performing teams have higher coordination with a shallower curve. We discuss these findings and their relevance to understanding how low-level movement coordination facilitates CPS.
... So in fact negative emotions may foster creativity! We noticed a remarkable convergence of our claims and experimental findings regarding the positive incidence of enacting in the arising of new insights in problem-solving situations with very recent research in cognitive science (e.g., Glenberg 2015;Vallée-Tourangeau et al. 2016;Abrahamson and Trninic 2015). ...
Our work focuses on logic and language at a university in Cameroon. The mathematical discourse, carried by the language, generates ambiguities. At the university level, symbolism is introduced to clarify it. Because it is not taught in secondary school, it becomes a source of difficulties for students. Our thesis is as follows: “The determination of the logical structure of mathematical statements is necessary in order to properly use them in mathematics.” We conducted our study in the predicate calculus theory. In the first part of the paper, a summary of the theory is presented, followed by a logical analysis of two complex mathematical statements. The second part is a report of two sequences of an experiment that was conducted with first-year students that shows that knowledge of the logical structure of a statement enables students to clarify the ambiguities raised by language.
... So in fact negative emotions may foster creativity! We noticed a remarkable convergence of our claims and experimental findings regarding the positive incidence of enacting in the arising of new insights in problem-solving situations with very recent research in cognitive science (e.g., Glenberg 2015;Vallée-Tourangeau et al. 2016;Abrahamson and Trninic 2015). ...
This study examined how two middle school mathematics teachers changed from being reluctant to modify tasks in mathematics textbooks to having positive attitudes about textbook task modification. In order to successfully coordinate a curriculum revision with the textbooks they use, mathematics teachers need to be able to use their in-depth understanding of the intentions of both the revision and textbooks to modify and implement tasks appropriately. The two middle school teachers’ cases in this study showed that it is possible to change teachers’ negative attitudes about modifying tasks in mathematics textbooks if they explicitly understand the complexity in mathematics teaching and go through a sequence of activities that help them understand the revised curriculum in detail, interpret and modify textbook tasks, and implement the modified tasks and reflect on their implementation.
... So in fact negative emotions may foster creativity! We noticed a remarkable convergence of our claims and experimental findings regarding the positive incidence of enacting in the arising of new insights in problem-solving situations with very recent research in cognitive science (e.g., Glenberg 2015;Vallée-Tourangeau et al. 2016;Abrahamson and Trninic 2015). ...
The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of the research that we have been conducting in our research group in Mexico about the linear transformation concept, focusing on difficulties associated with its learning, intuitive mental models that students may develop in relation with it, an outline of a genetic decomposition that describes a possible way in which this concept can be constructed, problems that students may experience with regard to registers of representation, and the role that dynamic geometry environments might play in interpreting its effects. Preliminary results from an ongoing study about what it means to visualize the process of a linear transformation are reported. A literature review that directly relates to the content of this chapter as well as directions for future research and didactical suggestions are provided.
KeywordsLinear transformationVisualizationRepresentationDynamic geometryLinear algebra
... So in fact negative emotions may foster creativity! We noticed a remarkable convergence of our claims and experimental findings regarding the positive incidence of enacting in the arising of new insights in problem-solving situations with very recent research in cognitive science (e.g., Glenberg 2015;Vallée-Tourangeau et al. 2016;Abrahamson and Trninic 2015). ...
Algebra can be viewed as a language of mathematics; playing a major role for students’ opportunities to pursue many different types of education in a modern society. It may therefore seem obvious that algebra should play a major role in school mathematics. However, analyses based on data from several international large-scale studies have shown that there are great differences between countries when it comes to algebra; in some countries algebra plays a major role, while this is not the case in other countries. These differences have been shown consistent over time and at different levels in school. This paper points out and discusses how these differences may interfere with individual students’ rights and opportunities to pursue the education they want, and how this may interfere with the societies’ need to recruit people to a number of professions.
... So in fact negative emotions may foster creativity! We noticed a remarkable convergence of our claims and experimental findings regarding the positive incidence of enacting in the arising of new insights in problem-solving situations with very recent research in cognitive science (e.g., Glenberg 2015;Vallée-Tourangeau et al. 2016;Abrahamson and Trninic 2015). ...
This paper poses methodological questions concerning the evaluation of emotion in the process of mathematical learning where the interaction between emotion and cognition occurs. These methodological aspects are considered not only from the perspective of educational psychology but from that of mathematics education. Some epistemological and ontological aspects, which are considered central to the cognition-affect interplay, are noted. Special attention is given to the notion of cognitive-affective structure as a dynamic system. The interplay between cognition and affect in mathematics is viewed through the concepts of local and global affect and using a mathematical working space model. A model of this interplay is illustrated with research examples, enabling us to move from descriptions of cognition-affect at an individual level to the explanation of the tendency of a group. The non-linear modelling of emotion is reflected in the affect-cognition local structure.
... So in fact negative emotions may foster creativity! We noticed a remarkable convergence of our claims and experimental findings regarding the positive incidence of enacting in the arising of new insights in problem-solving situations with very recent research in cognitive science (e.g., Glenberg 2015;Vallée-Tourangeau et al. 2016;Abrahamson and Trninic 2015). ...
We argue that an approach to the learning of mathematics based on enactive (bodily acted out) metaphorising may significantly help in alleviating the cognitive abuse millions of children worldwide suffer when exposed to mathematics. We present illustrative examples of enactive metaphoric approaches in the context of problem posing and solving in mathematics education, involving geometry and randomness, two critical subjects in school mathematics. Our examples show to what extent the way a mathematical situation is metaphorised and enacted by the learners shapes their emerging ideas and insights and how this may help to bridge the gap between the ‘mathematically gifted’ and those apparently not so gifted or mathematically inclined. Our experimental background includes a broad spectrum of prospective secondary math teachers, in-service primary teachers and their pupils, first-year university students majoring in social sciences and humanities and university students majoring in mathematics.
... So in fact negative emotions may foster creativity! We noticed a remarkable convergence of our claims and experimental findings regarding the positive incidence of enacting in the arising of new insights in problem-solving situations with very recent research in cognitive science (e.g., Glenberg 2015;Vallée-Tourangeau et al. 2016;Abrahamson and Trninic 2015). ...
Since the foundation of the Mathematikum, Germany, in 2002 and Il Giardino di Archimede, Florence, Italy, in 2004 there have been many activities around the world to present mathematical experiments in exhibitions and museums. Although these activities are all very successful with respect to their number of visitors, the question arises what is their impact for “learning” mathematics in a broad sense. This question is discussed in the paper. We present a few experiments from the Mathematikum and shall then discuss the questions, as to whether these are experiments and whether they show mathematics. The conclusion will be that experiments provide an optimal first step into mathematics. This means in particular that they do not offer the whole depth of mathematical reasoning, but let the visitors experience real mathematics, insofar as they provide insight by thinking.
... So in fact negative emotions may foster creativity! We noticed a remarkable convergence of our claims and experimental findings regarding the positive incidence of enacting in the arising of new insights in problem-solving situations with very recent research in cognitive science (e.g., Glenberg 2015;Vallée-Tourangeau et al. 2016;Abrahamson and Trninic 2015). ...
This paper explores the design and longitudinal effect of an intervention approach for supporting children who are mathematically vulnerable: the Extending Mathematical Understanding (EMU)—Intervention approach. The progress over three years of Grade 1 children who participated in the intervention was analysed and compared with the progress of peers across four whole number domains. The findings show that participation in the EMU program was associated with increased confidence and accelerated learning that was maintained and extended in subsequent years for most children. Forty per cent of children were no longer vulnerable in the year following the intervention, and others were vulnerable in fewer domains. Comparative data for non-EMU participants highlights the wide distribution of mathematics knowledge across all children in each grade level. This explains why classroom teaching is so complex and highlights the challenges teachers face in providing inclusive learning environments that enable all students to thrive.
Recently, Kirchhoff and Kiverstein have argued that the extended consciousness thesis, namely the claim that the material vehicles of consciousness extend beyond our heads, is entirely compatible with, and actually mandated by, a correct interpretation of the predictive processing framework. To do so, they rely on a potent argument in favor of the extended consciousness thesis, namely the Dynamical Entanglement and Unique Temporal Signature (DEUTS) argument. Here, we will critically examine Kirchhoff and Kiverstein’s endeavor, arguing for the following three claims. First, we will claim that Kirchhoff and Kiverstein’s emphasis on culture and cultural practices does not help them substantiate the extended consciousness thesis. Secondly, we will argue that the way in which Kirchhoff and Kiverstein formalize the boundaries of a subject’s conscious mind is inadequate, as it yields conclusions running counter some of their assumptions. Lastly, we will argue that the DEUTS argument does not establish the extended consciousness thesis, as it licenses a phenomenal bloat objection which is exactly analogous to the “cognitive bloat” objection to the extended mind thesis. We will thus conclude that Kirchhoff and Kiverstein’s proposed marriage between the extended consciousness thesis and predictive processing fails, and that, contrary to a popular opinion, DEUTS is not a strong argument in favor of the extended consciousness thesis.
To better understand and predict creativity and innovation, researchers have examined the cognitive mechanisms underlying insight problem-solving. The role of working memory (WM) in insight, in particular, has been the subject of numerous studies. However, these studies have led to widely conflicting results. Some studies show a positive relationship between insight and WM, whereas others show null or even negative effects. We propose that these seemingly contradictory results indicate a more nuanced relationship between WM and insight: WM can both help and hinder insight. In reviewing prior research, we theorize that results diverge due to differences in how insight and WM are measured. WM likely has different effects across the phases of problem-solving, and insight tasks vary in their reliance on each phase. In addition, WM is a multifaceted construct, and different WM processes may support or hinder insight. By delineating the moderating roles of these factors across studies, we will better understand when and why insight will be supported versus hindered.
This article challenges the traditional view of progress as a linear trajectory from ignorance to knowledge, arguing that creative cognition involves an extended and dynamic system of non linear possibility generation. It emphasises the importance of an externalist approach which takes into account the role of objects in the environment in shaping cognition. Accidents are seen as a key trigger for creative thinking, as they disrupt planned cognitive trajectories and introduce novel elements into the cognitive ecosystem, leading to new possibilities that were previously inconceivable. However, how we filter these opportunities is rarely explored. The feeling of impasse, when problem-solvers are stuck and unable to find a solution, is also explored as an important generative state for creativity. While this state may be unpleasant, research suggests that persevering through it can lead to a sense of 'aha' and may be actively sought out by creatives. The article concludes that further research is needed to fully understand the relationship between aversive states, chance and human imagination in order to understand creative thinking.
According to the extended cognition thesis, an agent’s cognitive system can sometimes include extracerebral components amongst its physical constituents. Here, we show that such a view of cognition has an unjustifiably anthropocentric focus, for it depicts cognitive extensions as a human-only affair. In contrast, we will argue that if human cognition extends, then the cognition of many non-human animals extends too, for many non-human animals rely on the same cognition-extending strategies humans rely on. To substantiate this claim, we will proceed as follows. First (§1), we will introduce the extended cognition thesis, exposing its anthropocentric bias. Then, we will show that humans and many non-human animals rely on the same cognition-extending strategies. To do so, we will discuss a variety of case studies, including “intrabodily” cognitive extensions such as the spinal cord (§2), the widespread reliance on epistemic actions to solve cognitive tasks (§3) and cases of animal cognitive offloading (§4). We’ll then allay some worries our claim might raise (§5) to then conclude the paper (§6).
La palabra “Matemáticas” supone para la mayoría de las personas y sobretodo estudiantes un compendio de ideas prefijadas negativas: difíciles, abstractas, incomprensibles, e incluso, generadoras de ansiedad. Generación tras generación se ha empleado el método tradicional sin cuestionarlo en exceso, cuyo tratamiento del número se hace de forma cerrada basada en cifras, exigiendo una abstracción por encima de las posibilidades del alumnado en determinados momentos, mientras que en otros no aprovecha sus habilidades innatas, no existe un equilibrio en este sentido. Estas matemáticas que tienen cabida en la escuela tradicional, además de como se ha indicado, capaces saturar de la memoria de trabajo, están centradas en quehaceres mecánicos, reduciendo considerablemente el razonamiento. Por ello se propone un Proyecto de Investigación basado en un método alternativo al tradicional, llamado Método ABN. Valorando su influencia en el rendimiento matemático del alumnado de 3º de EPO, así como su impacto en el nivel de memoria de trabajo, considerando esta función ejecutiva mejor predictor del desempeño académico que incluso el cociente intelectual del alumnado2.La naturaleza del Proyecto es cuantitativa con un diseño empírico-analítico, concretamente cuasi-experimental al contar con grupos experimentales y otros control. Al ser un diseño correlacional se valora la influencia de la variable independiente (el ABN) empleado solo en los grupos experimentales, en contra del tradicional, empleado en los control. Y a su vez supone un diseño comparativo, puesto que pretende analizar las diferencias existentes entre los propios grupos experimentales por diferencias de implantación ABN. Los resultados del Proyecto son derivados del meta-análisis a modo de síntesis de la evidencia investigativa con el fin de replicar sus resultados y estimar que el empleo del ABN augura un mayor rendimiento matemático y una mejora en el nivel de memoria de trabajo. Las conclusiones del Proyecto no son concluyentes al verse condicionado por la pandemia COVID-19, pero lo indicios apuntan que el adiestramiento mecánico y repetitivo no puede superar la velocidad, efectividad y significatividad práctica (3) alcanzada con el recurso metodológico ABN, al realizar un tratamiento matemático de manera abierta, reflexiva y natural.
Insight is a form of comprehension that results in the connection between two hitherto unappreciated, unacknowledged, or simply unknown ideas and, consequently, expands the realm of the possible. Making these connections is a powerful driver of creativity and innovation. As a putative cognitive process, insight has exercised psychological researchers for over 100 years. Efforts to capture insight under laboratory conditions are constrained by exigencies of operationalization and control, as well as by an implicit ontological position that casts insight as a property of the brain. As a result, psychological research has focused on what we term second-order problem-solving, which is reasoning triggered by problems presented as propositions that describe states of the world. People are tasked with finding new connections among the problem elements, but these connections can only be made by manipulating a mental representation of the problem. Creative cognition outside the psychologist’s laboratory involves a great deal of interaction with the world. In contrast to second-order problem-solving, first-order problem-solving characterizes activities of embodied agents as they interact and manipulate the world around them. Creativity and insight emerge through a transactional process of transformation: physical features cue actions that change both the reasoner and the physical environment in which he or she is embedded. Insightful new possibles are realized through an active and mutually transforming exploration of the problem-solving environment. We discuss insight as an enacted process, involving action and perception. As a physical and perceptual activity, a degree of serendipity is inevitable, and, in some circumstances, insight becomes “outsight.” We identify eight key features of first-order creative cognition that map out a new program of research on insight.
Design is a key part of the healthcare intervention development process, yet it is often viewed as unclear, unstructured, and challenging. INDIGO (“INtervention DesIGn with stakehOlders”) is a new mixed method that brings structure and creativity to the healthcare intervention design process and facilitates a holistic perspective of complex interventions. INDIGO combines and adapts timelining and storyboarding and enables users to create a visual representation of a complex intervention. It comprises card storyboard tokens representing intervention elements that can be moved around on a timeline chart. We discuss the background and development of INDIGO, including existing mixed methods approaches to intervention design. We then provide examples of the use of INDIGO in two empirical studies that informed the development of a brief mindfulness-based intervention, illustrating how INDIGO supported the generation of new insights. We go on to discuss the practicalities, benefits and challenges of INDIGO, including feedback from study participants. This article contributes to the field of mixed methods research by extending the scope and utility of timelining and storyboarding, and by clearly describing INDIGO so the method can be used by other researchers or intervention developers.
Один из многообещающих вариантов внедрения моторной активности в процесс решения мыслительных задач был предложен в статье Weller и коллег. В ходе «интерактивного» условия эксперимента испытуемые могли взаимодействовать с реальными предметами, составлявшими проблемную ситуацию. Эта экспериментальная манипуляция привела к значимому увеличению успешности решения большинства использованных задач спичечной алгебры. С учетом того, что задачи различались по источникам сложности, трудно предложить один (или общий) вариант движений решателя, который мог бы объяснить одинаковое положительное влияние интерактивного условия на успешность решения задач разнойстепени сложности. Чтобы удостовериться в точности полученных результатов и оценить перспективность подобной экспериментальной манипуляции, мы провели концептуальную репликацию названного исследования в трех экспериментальных сериях, нацеленных: 1) напроверку эффектов интерактивного условия, 2) на расширенную репликацию тех же эффектов, поскольку она включала в себя экспериментальные условия, предполагающие разную степень моторной активности решателя, 3)на расширенную репликацию тех же эффектов, так как она содержала условия с максимально выраженной интерактивностью, благодаря использованию технологий виртуальной реальности. Кроме того, мы увеличили список зависимых переменных: помимо успешности решения было использовано количество эпистемических и прагматических действийрешателя. Увеличение количества первых может свидетельствовать о переносе части когнитивных функций на окружающую предметную среду. Ни в одном случае мы не смогли реплицировать результаты коллег. Хотя во второй серии эксперимента эпистемических действий было значимо больше, это никак не повлияло на успешность решения. Обсуждаются потенциал и проблемы интерактивного решения и его роль для изучения воплощенного познания.
Roger Dominowski made a very substantial and lasting contribution to the study of higher mental processes and particularly to the area of insight problem solving. This is a tribute to his work.
Autistic children are thought to develop social attention skills differently from non-autistic children. Previous work has shown that technology, and specifically tangible toys, could have the potential to support social attention in autistic children. A key challenge is knowing how to design and use interactive and intelligent technologies to support interaction in autistic children, given the heterogeneity in levels of social motivation, social development, and interest in digital technologies. To address this challenge, we examined in detail the interaction between digital features and autistic children’s joint engagement in a real-world setting, exploring the impact of tangible constraints in fostering social interaction. The current study observed autistic children (aged between 12 and 15 years) playing with a digital robotic toy and a non-digital counterpart, and measured social attention and engagement during free play. The results showed that increased and higher levels of joint attention when children had to share a toy between them, on both digital and non-digital interfaces. We found that autistic children individually vary in their propensity to engage in social interactions, as well as their responses to digital features. This work contributes to a growing area of evidence that tangible and smart technologies can create social opportunities for autistic children.
Research on insight problem solving sets itself a challenging goal: How to explain the origin of a new idea. It compounds the difficulty of this challenge by traditionally seeking to explain the phenomenon in strictly mental terms. Rather, we suggest that thoughts and actions are bound to objects, inviting a granular description of the world within which thinking proceeds. As the reasoner transforms the world, the physical traces of these changes can be mapped in space and time. Not only can the reasoner see these changes, and act upon them, the researcher can develop new inscription devices that captures the trajectory of the creative arc along spatial and temporal coordinates. Kinenoetic is a term we employ to capture the idea that knowledge comes from the movement of objects and that this knowledge is both at the level of the problem-solver and at the level of the researcher. This form of knowledge can only be constructed in problem solving environments where reasoners can manipulate physical elements. A kinenoetic analysis tracks and maps the changes to the object-qua-models of proto solutions, and in the process unveils the physical genesis of new ideas and creativity. Our aim here is to lay out a method for using the objects commonly employed in interactive problem-solving research, tracing the process of thought to elucidate underlying cognitive mechanisms. Thus, the focus turns from the effects of objects on thoughts, to tracing object-thought mutualities as they are enacted and made visible.
Para la ciencia cognitiva de la primera mitad de siglo XX la mente ocupa el mismo espacio segregado e individual que el cerebro. En este espacio la materia biológica es una contingencia que podría ser reemplazada por un soporte sintético, y los procesos relacionan sintácticamente símbolos de por sí desprovistos de significado. Prueba de la importancia que ha cobrado esta dimensión descontextualizada y desencarnada de la cognición es la popularidad de la neuroeducación. Según todas las tendencias que suscriben alguna forma de neurocentrismo en educación, el espacio donde ocurre el aprendizaje es el cerebro; sería por ende necesario partir de su estudio objetivo para entender y mejorar la educación. Este artículo utiliza los datos obtenidos por medio de observación participante de la dinámica social en aula, a lo largo de casi siete años de experiencia como docente de primaria y secundaria, para argumentar que la teoría computacional de la mente y la neurociencia no son suficientes para entender los cambios en modalidad de adquisición, memorización y procesamiento de la información por parte de la Generación Z. En general, los procesos cognitivos humanos son contextualizados, encarnados y distribuidos. Datos procedentes de la antropología cultural y la arqueología cognitiva brindan evidencia adicional a este enfoque. Se propone por lo tanto un marco teórico del procesamiento de la información basado en la cognición distribuida, a fin de aportar validez ecológica al estudio de la memoria y otros procesos cognitivos en ámbito educativo.
Qualitative research on creativity often highlights the role of accidents in creative process, but there is little research that takes these as its main topic. Perhaps because a model that relies on accidents undermines the meaningfulness of creativity; perhaps because the phenomenon itself is too complex to underwrite an entire research program. This paper suggests the framework of serendipity to better understand the interaction between a person and chance occurrences. Serendipity is a fortuitous accident, the enactment of environmental luck by a prepared mind. Current research on serendipity proceeds from a mainly retrospective position, centring the experience of the person. This creates a serendipitous narrative without necessarily telling us more about the moment itself. It is thus harder to consider the role of accidental moments and the nature of their contribution to the creative process. We argue that these moments, viewed outside of the person’s narrative account, are worthy of study and offer some suggestions for how that might occur. We use the term “microserendipity” to designate moments which arise from distributed creative agency. We suggest we can support current research in both creativity and serendipity by undertaking detailed analysis of observational data to scaffold understanding of these complex phenomena.
Dementia limits the ability of individuals to maintain social relationships, functional independence, and physical and psychological vitality in older age. Therefore, it is of critical importance to consider lifestyle preventative and therapeutic strategies, such as physical activity participation, involvement in cognitively stimulating creative activities, or perhaps a combination of the two. This chapter discusses the potential impact of dementia on creativity, physical activity, and exercise participation and whether exercise and creativity may each exert individual effects on the maintenance and/or facilitation of cognitive health. We explore these suggested influencers in the context of biological and theoretical mechanisms underlying dementia and provide recommendations for future research experiments unifying physical exercise and creative activities into tailored interventions designed to better comprehend this disease and perhaps counteract the devastating implications dementia prognoses present to optimal physical and mental functioning across the human life span.
In the wild, thinking demonstrably uses interactive processes that draw on a wide range of external resources, spanning multiple time scales. As Malafouris (2015, p. 361) puts it, “cognition is not a within property; it is an in-between process”. Interactive processes configure extended systems within which each human agent is embedded. Yet much research on higher cognition, such as problem solving, reflects an implicit but deep commitment to methodological individualism that casts the agent as the ontological locus of cognition, and largely dictates the nature of the research enterprise. Thus, tasks to measure capacities and gauge reasoning performance are designed in a manner that reduces or eliminates the possibility of interacting with the problem presentation; if thinking takes place in the head, there is no need or reason to engineer procedures wherein agents can interact with the task's physical constituents. Conversely, a methodological interactivism forces one to acknowledge the participative yet not all-encompassing role of capacities such as working memory and thinking dispositions; it also encourages the granular mapping of the cognitive ecosystem from which new ideas emerge. To adopt an interactivist perspective is thus to focus on the cognitive resources of the extended system inviting a careful description of how these resources are dynamically configured over time and space to promote the development of new ideas in problem solving. In turn, a systemic perspective encourages the development of interventions that promote cognitive performance through the optimisation of systemic rather than individualist cognitive resources.
So‐called insight problems are widely studied because they tap into the creative thinking that is crucial for solving real problems. However, insight problems are typically presented in static formats (on paper, computer) that allow no physical interaction with the problem elements, whereas such an interaction might in fact reduce the load on limited cognitive resources, such as working memory (WM) capacity, thereby facilitating solutions. To test this proposition, 124 young adults were allowed to interact physically with nine established insight problems, while another 124 people attempted to solve these problems using paper and pencil. Additionally, hints were provided for three problems that typically no‐one solves. No general facilitating effect of physical interaction was found, with only one problem clearly benefitting from it. Furthermore, making use of hints was actually hindered by physical interaction. No difference in perceived task load and correlation with WM capacity was observed between the formats, and subjective ratings of insight were virtually unaffected by presentation format. Overall, physical interaction minimally affected insight problem‐solving, which appears to rely strongly on internalized cognitive processing involving WM.
This comment presents Maria Montessori (1870–1952) and highlights that her child-centered method of education is based on brilliant intuitions, which were confirmed by neuroscience research many decades later, such as the distinction of three critical periods in children’s psychobiological development; the importance of the environment in supporting cerebral development and in promoting learning, as well as of affective stimulation in psychological growth and maturation; the specific neural structure of humans that specifically enables the acquisition of a language; the vital role of fine object manipulation in neuropsychological development, and of the physical exercise in brain and nervous system development.
Creative thought is conventionally believed to involve searching memory and generating multiple independent candidate ideas followed by selection and refinement of the most promising. Honing theory, which grew out of the quantum approach to describing how concepts interact, posits that what appears to be discrete, separate ideas are actually different projections of the same underlying mental representation, which can be described as a superposition state, and which may take different outward forms when reflected upon from different perspectives. As creative thought proceeds, this representation loses potentiality to be viewed from different perspectives and manifest as different outcomes. Honing theory yields different predictions from conventional theories about the mental representation of an idea midway through the creative process. These predictions were pitted against one another in two studies: one closed-ended and one open-ended. In the first study, participants were interrupted midway through solving an analogy problem and wrote down what they were thinking in terms of a solution. In the second, participants were instructed to create a painting that expressed their true essence and describe how they conceived of the painting. For both studies, naïve judges categorized these responses as supportive of either the conventional view or the honing theory view. The results of both studies were significantly more consistent with the predictions of honing theory. Some implications for creative cognition, and cognition in general, are discussed.
In this chapter, we propose a systemic model of thinking (SysTM) to account for higher cognitive operations such as how an agent makes inferences, solves problems and makes decisions. The SysTM model conceives thinking as a cognitive process that evolves in time and space and results in a new cognitive event (i.e., a new solution to a problem). This presupposes that such cognitive events are emerging from cognitive interactivity, which we define as the meshed network of reciprocal causations between an agent’s mental processing and the transformative actions she applies to her immediate environment to achieve a cognitive result. To explain how cognitive interactivity results in cognitive events, SysTM builds upon the classical information processing model but breaks from the view that cognitive events result from a linear information processing path originating in the perception of a problem stimulus that is mentally processed to produce a cognitive event. Instead, SysTM holds that information processing in thinking evolves through a succession of deductive and inductive processing loops. Both loops give rise to transformative actions on the physical information layout, resulting in new perceptual inputs which inform the next processing loop. Such actions result from the enaction of mental action plans in deductive loops and from unplanned direct perception of action possibilities or affordances in inductive loops. To account for direct perception, we introduce the concept of an affordance pool to refer to a short term memory storage of action possibilities in working memory. We conclude by illustrating how SysTM can be used to derive new predictions and guide the study of cognitive interactivity in thinking.
Models of creative problem solving are predicated upon mental states to explain everything from the outcome of problem‐solving experiments to the emergence of artistic creativity. We present two converging perspectives that describe a profoundly different ontological description of creativity. Our analysis proceeds from a distinction between first‐order problem solving, where the agent interacts with a physical model of the problem and second‐order problem solving, where the agent must cogitate a solution to a problem that is presented as a verbal description of a state of the world but where the agent does not or cannot transform physical elements of a problem. We acknowledge the recent evidence that foregrounds the importance of working memory in problem solving, including insight problem solving. However, we stress that the impressive psychometric success is obtained with a methodology that only measures second‐order problem solving; we question whether first‐order problem solving is equally well predicted by measures of cognitive or dispositional capacities. We propose that if mental simulation is replaced by the opportunity to engage with a physical model of a problem then the environment can provide affordances that help the participant to solve problems. In the second part of the paper, we present the subjective experience of an artist as he monitors the microdecisions that occur during the morphogenesis of a large, clay, sculptural installation. The testimony is a vivid demonstration that creative action occurs, not in the brain, but in the movement between the hand and the clay. Insight becomes outsight.
A growing body of experimental work highlights the potential value of unstructured, interactive, or spontaneous motions, including gestures, dance, shifting body postures, physical object‐manipulation, drawing, etc. to favorably impact creative performance. However, despite these favorable findings, to our knowledge, no systematic review has been conducted to explore the totality of evidence for embodied activities in this arena. Thus, the objective of this paper was to systematically evaluate the potential effects of embodied experimental manipulations on traditionally assessed creativity outcomes. A systematic review was conducted utilizing PubMed, PsychInfo, Sports Discus, and Google Scholar databases. The 20 studies evaluated employed a variety of methodological approaches regarding study design, embodied manipulation, and selection of specific creativity outcomes. Despite these variations, embodied movement robustly enhanced creativity across nearly all studies (90%), with no studies showing a detrimental effect. Based on the evaluation of the studies reviewed, several common themes emerged. These included the relevance of symbolic metaphors and distributed embodied cognitions, selection of embodied modality, specific measurement considerations, as well as the importance for implementing true, inactive control conditions in embodied creativity research. This review expands on these findings and places them in the context of improving future embodied creativity research.
The purpose of the present study was to revise the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale Version 10 (BIS-10), identify the factor structure of the items among normals, and compare their scores on the revised form (BIS-11) with psychiatric inpatients and prison inmates. The scale was administered to 412 college undergraduates, 248 psychiatric inpatients, and 73 male prison inmates. Exploratory principal components analysis of the items identified six primary factors and three second-order factors. The three second-order factors were labeled Attentional Impulsiveness, Motor Impulsiveness, and Nonplanning Impulsiveness. Two of the three second-order factors identified in the BIS-11 were consistent with those proposed by Barratt (1985), but no cognitive impulsiveness component was identified per se. The results of the present study suggest that the total score of the BIS-11 is an internally consistent measure of impulsiveness and has potential clinical utility for measuring impulsiveness among selected patient and inmate populations.
Individual creativity is standardly treated as an ‘internalist’ process occurring solely in the head. An alternative, more interactionist view is presented here, where working with objects, media and other external things is seen as a fundamental component of creative thought. The value of chance interaction and chance cueing — practices widely used in the creative arts — is explored briefly in an account of the creative method of choreographer Wayne McGregor and then more narrowly in an experimental study that compared performance on a Scrabble-like word discovery problem. Subjects were presented with seven letters and given two minutes to call out three-to-seven-letter English words. There were three conditions: The tiles were fixed in place, subjects were free to move the tiles manually or the tiles could be randomly shuffled. Results showed that random shuffling was best, with manual movement second. Three reasons are provided: Shuffling is faster and cheaper than mentally thinking of candidates; randomizing strings covers the search space better than a deterministic method based on past successes; and randomizing is equivalent to adding diversity to a team, which is known empirically to lead to more creative solutions.
This chapter presents an interactivity-based approach to human problem-solving in the wild. It introduces the notion of 'interactivity', here defined as sense-saturated coordination that contributes to human action. On this view, interactivity is an ontological substrate that can be studied as interaction, as cognition, or as ecological niche production. While the chapter theoretically argues in favour of a unified , trans-disciplinary approach to interactivity, it turns its attention to the cognitive ecology of human problem-solving. It does so by presenting a method of Cognitive Event Analysis, that leads to a detailed analysis of how a problem in the wild is being solved. The analysis addresses the cognitive dynamics of how two persons in a work setting reach an insight into the nature of a problem. These dynamics include the spatial organisation of the workplace, the interbodily dynamics between the two participants (especially in relation to gaze and the manual handling of papers), and verbal patterns that prompt them to simulate how the problem appears to a third party. The chapter concludes that human problem-solving is far less linear and planned than assumed in much work on the topic. Rather that problem-solving, it appears as solution-probing in real-time. The cognitive trajectory to a viable solution is thus self-organised, unplanned, and on the edge of chaos.
Outside the cognitive psychologist's laboratory, problem-solving is an activity that takes place in a rich web of interactions involving people and artefacts. This interactivity is constituted by fine-grained action–perception cycles, and it allows a reasoner's comprehension of the problem to emerge from a coalition of internal and external resources. Taking an ecological approach to problem-solving, this paper introduces a qualitative method, Cognitive Event Analysis, for studying the fine-grained interactivity between a problem-solving agent and his/her environment. To demonstrate the potential of this method, it is used to study a single subject solving the so-called 17 Animals problem using a material model. The fine-grained procedure allows tracking the solution to a serendipity that was brought about because of the participant's aesthetic considerations and a change in her perceptual figure-ground configuration. While a qualitative single-case method cannot prove specific models of problem-solving, it questions prevalent mentalist models, and it generates new hypotheses on insight problem-solving, because it allows the researcher to attend to outliers and to variability on a fast and fine-grained between-measurement timescale.
Successful statistical reasoning emerges from a dynamic system including: a cognitive agent, material artifacts with their actions possibilities, and the thoughts and actions that are realized while reasoning takes place. Five experiments provide evidence that enabling the physical manipulation of the problem information (through the use of playing cards) substantially improves statistical reasoning, without training or instruction, not only with natural frequency statements (Experiment 1) but also with single-event probability statements (Experiment 2). Improved statistical reasoning was not simply a matter of making all sets and subsets explicit in the pack of cards (Experiment 3), it was not merely due to the discrete and countable layout resulting from the cards manipulation, and it was not mediated by participants' level of engagement with the task (Experiment 5). The positive effect of an increased manipulability of the problem information on participants' reasoning performance was generalizable both over problems whose numeric properties did not map perfectly onto the cards and over different types of cards (Experiment 4). A systematic analysis of participants' behaviors revealed that manipulating cards improved performance when reasoners spent more time actively changing the presentation layout "in the world" as opposed to when they spent more time passively pointing at cards, seemingly attempting to solve the problem "in their head." Although they often go unnoticed, the action possibilities of the material artifacts available and the actions that are realized on those artifacts are constitutive of successful statistical reasoning, even in adults who have ostensibly reached cognitive maturity. (PsycINFO Database Record
(c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
Since the Gestalt psychologists made the distinction approximately 100 years ago, psychologists have differentiated between solving problems through analysis versus insight. The present paper presents evidence to support the idea that, rather than conceptualising insight versus analysis as distinct modes of solving problems, it is more useful to conceive of insight and analysis as two approaches within a set of possible solving methods. In the present research, 60 participants solved insight problems while thinking aloud, which provided evidence concerning the processes underlying problem solution. Comparison with performance of a nonverbalisation control group (n = 35) indicated no negative effects of thinking aloud on insight in problem solving. The results supported the idea that various methods are utilised in solving insight problems. The “classic” impasse–restructuring–insight sequence occurred in only a small minority of solutions. A number of other solution methods were found, ranging from relatively direct applications of knowledge, to various heuristic methods, to restructuring arising from new information gleaned from a failed solution. It is concluded that there is not a sharp distinction between solving a problem through analysis versus insight, and implications of that conclusion are discussed.
Outside the psychologist's laboratory, thinking proceeds on the basis of a great deal of interaction with artefacts that are recruited to augment problem-solving skills. The role of interactivity in problem solving was investigated using a river-crossing problem. In Experiment 1A, participants completed the same problem twice, once in a low interactivity condition, and once in a high interactivity condition (with order counterbalanced across participants). Learning, as gauged in terms of latency to completion, was much more pronounced when the high interactivity condition was experienced second. When participants first completed the task in the high interactivity condition, transfer to the low interactivity condition during the second attempt was limited; Experiment 1B replicated this pattern of results. Participants thus showed greater facility to transfer their experience of completing the problem from a low to a high interactivity condition. Experiment 2 was designed to determine the amount of learning in a low and high interactivity condition; in this experiment participants completed the problem twice, but level of interactivity was manipulated between subjects. Learning was evident in both the low and high interactivity groups, but latency per move was significantly faster in the high interactivity group, in both presentations. So-called problem isomorphs instantiated in different task ecologies draw upon different skills and abilities; a distributed cognition analysis may provide a fruitful perspective on learning and transfer.
Errors in estimating and forecasting often result from the failure to collect and consider enough relevant informa-tion. We examine whether attributes associated with persistence in information acquisition can predict performance in an estimation task. We focus on actively open-minded thinking (AOT), need for cognition, grit, and the tendency to maximize or satisfice when making decisions. In three studies, participants made estimates and predictions of uncertain quantities, with varying levels of control over the amount of information they could collect before estimating. Only AOT predicted performance. This relationship was mediated by information acquisition: AOT predicted the tendency to collect information, and information acquisition predicted performance. To the extent that available information is predictive of future outcomes, actively open-minded thinkers are more likely than others to make accurate forecasts.
Recent developments in cognitive science reject the classical view of cognition as a cerebral activity involving the rule-based processing of symbols inside the mind and call for a reconceptualization of cognition as emerging in a system encompassing the brain and the body in situ. Current dissenting views come with two corollaries. First, representations are unnecessary to explain complex behaviors. Second, there is a spatio-temporal dimension to cognition. We argue that a radical departure from the classical information-processing model is untenable because higher-level cognition is fundamentally representation-based. However, we also argue that classical accounts of thinking put too great an emphasis on the role of internal representations and mental processing. This obscures the symbiotic relationship between thinking and acting and the role of spatio-temporal dynamics and ecological affordances on thinking. To fully understand how people think, solve problems, and make decisions, we need to break from traditional conceptions of thinking activities as sequestered in a static mind, transcend current debates about the localization of cognition and, instead, focus our efforts towards better understanding how thinking emerges in ecological space and ecological time from the transactional flow of action and representational opportunities outcropping from a dynamic agent-environment interface.
There is a paucity of information surrounding maths anxiety levels in the British undergraduate student population and, due to terminological issues, existing measures of maths anxiety may not be appropriate measures to use with this population. The current study therefore reports on the development and validation of a new maths anxiety scale. Using a large sample of British undergraduates, the 23-item Mathematics Anxiety Scale-UK (MAS-UK) was shown to be a reliable and valid measure of maths anxiety. Exploratory factor analysis indicated the existence of three factors, highlighting maths anxiety as a multidimensional construct. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed a good-fitting model. Normative data on maths anxiety in a British undergraduate student population are provided, along with comparisons between academic undergraduate subject areas and genders. The MAS-UK may represent an easily administrable, reliable and valid tool for assessing maths anxiety in British and potentially European undergraduate student populations.
The presentation of a Bayesian inference problem in terms of natural frequencies rather than probabilities has been shown to enhance performance. The effect of individual differences in cognitive processing on Bayesian reasoning has rarely been studied, despite enabling us to test process-oriented variants of the two main accounts of the facilitative effect of natural frequencies: The ecological rationality account (ERA), which postulates an evolutionarily shaped ease of natural frequency automatic processing, and the nested sets account (NSA), which posits analytical processing of nested sets. In two experiments, we found that cognitive reflection abilities predicted normative performance equally well in tasks featuring whole and arbitrarily parsed objects (Experiment 1) and that cognitive abilities and thinking dispositions (analytical vs. intuitive) predicted performance with single-event probabilities, as well as natural frequencies (Experiment 2). Since these individual differences indicate that analytical processing improves Bayesian reasoning, our findings provide stronger support for the NSA than for the ERA.
Thinking efficiency was examined in mental arithmetic as a function of the degree of interactivity afforded by the task. Participants carried out single-digit additions, involving either 7 or 11 numbers, as fast and as accurately as possible. They completed the sums in blocks, five from the short 7-number set first, and five from the longer 11-number set second. These sets were interpolated among a series of other tasks that measured numeracy and arithmetic skills, working memory capacity, visuo-spatial processing speed, and attention switching, in such a way as to permit the presentation of the sets twice, once with each of the sums presented on a piece of paper and participants placing their hands flat on the table and once with the sums presented as a set of manipulable tokens. Efficiency was measured as the ratio of performance over time invested. A significant interaction between condition and set size was observed: Efficiency was slightly better in the static condition for short sums but declined substantially relative to the interactive condition for long sums. Twenty-two percent of the variance in efficiency for hard sums in the static condition was explained by arithmetic skills and working memory capacity, whereas 45% of this variance was explained by arithmetic skills, working memory capacity, and attention switching skills in the interactive condition. A separate sample of 17 participants who provided concurrent verbal protocols as they solved the problems revealed that paths to solution and arithmetic strategies were substantially transformed by the opportunity to manipulate tokens.
Insight problem solving was investigated with the matchstick algebra problems developed by Knoblich, Ohlsson, Haider, and Rhenius (1999). These problems are false equations expressed with Roman numerals that can be made true by moving one matchstick. In a first group participants examined a static two dimensional representation of the false algebraic expression and told the experimenter which matchstick should be moved. In a second group,
participants interacted with a three dimensional representation of the false equation. Success rates in the static group for different problem types replicated the pattern of data reported in Knoblich et al. (1999). However, participants in the interactive group were significantly more likely to achieve insight. Problem solving success in the static group was best predicted by
performance on a test of numeracy, whereas in the interactive group it was best predicted by performance on a test of visuo spatial reasoning. Implications for process models of problem solving are discussed.
Insight problem solving is characterized by impasses, states of mind in which the thinker does not know what to do next. The authors hypothesized that impasses are broken by changing the problem representation, and 2 hypothetical mechanisms for representational change are described: the relaxation of constraints on the solution and the decomposition of perceptual chunks. These 2 mechanisms generate specific predictions about the relative difficulty of individual problems and about differential transfer effects. The predictions were tested in 4 experiments using matchstick arithmetic problems. The results were consistent with the predictions. Representational change is a more powerful explanation for insight than alternative hypotheses, if the hypothesized change processes are specified in detail. Overcoming impasses in insight is a special case of the general need to override the imperatives of past experience in the face of novel conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Need for cognition in contemporary literature refers to an individual's tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive endeavors. Individual differences in need for cognition have been the focus of investigation in over 100 empirical studies. This literature is reviewed, covering the theory and history of this variable, measures of interindividual variations in it, and empirical relationships between it and personality variables, as well as individuals' tendencies to seek and engage in effortful cognitive activity and enjoy cognitively effortful circumstances. The article concludes with discussions of an elaborated theory of the variable, including antecedent conditions; interindividual variations in it related to the manner information is acquired or processed to guide perceptions, judgments, and behavior; and the relationship between it and the 5-factor model of personality structure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study investigated the roles of the executive functions of inhibition and switching, and of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory capacities, in insight and non-insight tasks. A total of 18 insight tasks, 10 non-insight tasks, and measures of individual differences in working memory capacities, switching, and inhibition were administered to 120 participants. Performance on insight problems was not linked with executive functions of inhibition or switching but was linked positively to measures of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory capacities. Non-insight task performance was positively linked to the executive function of switching (but not to inhibition) and to verbal and visuo-spatial working memory capacities. These patterns regarding executive functions were maintained when the insight and non-insight composites were split into verbal and spatial insight and non-insight composite scores. The results are discussed in relation to dual processing accounts of thinking.
The binary divide between traditional cognitivist and enactivist paradigms is tied to their respective commitments to understanding
cognition as based on knowing that as opposed to knowing how. Using O'Regan's and Noë's landmark sensorimotor contingency
theory of perceptual experience as a foil, I demonstrate how easy it is to fall into conservative thinking. Although their
account is advertised as decidedly ‘skill-based’, on close inspection it shows itself to be riddled with suppositions threatening
to reduce it to a rules-and-representations approach. To remain properly enactivist it must be purged of such commitments
and indeed all commitment to mediating knowledge: it must embrace a more radical enactivism
The theory of the organism-environment system starts with the proposition that in any functional sense organism and environment
are inseparable and form only one unitary system. The organism cannot exist without the environment, and the environment has
descriptive properties only if it is connected to the organism. Although for practical purposes we do separate organism and
environment, this common-sense starting point leads in psychological theory to problems which cannot be solved. Therefore,
separation of organism and environment cannot be the basis of any scientific explanation of human behavior. The theory leads
to a reinterpretation of basic problems in many fields of inquiry and makes possible the definition of mental phenomena without
their reduction either to neural or biological activity or to separate mental functions. According to the theory, mental activity
is activity of the whole organism-environment system, and the traditional psychological concepts describe only different aspects
of organization of this system. Therefore, mental activity cannot be separated from the nervous system, but the nervous system
is only one part of the organism-environment system. This problem will be dealt with in detail in the second part of the article.
Although the ability to retain, process, and project prior experience onto future situations is indispensable, the human mind also possesses the ability to override experience and adapt to changing circumstances. Cognitive scientist Stellan Ohlsson analyzes three types of deep, non-monotonic cognitive change: creative insight, adaptation of cognitive skills by learning from errors, and conversion from one belief to another, incompatible belief. For each topic, Ohlsson summarizes past research, re-formulates the relevant research questions, and proposes information-processing mechanisms that answer those questions. The three theories are based on the principles of redistribution of activation, specialization of practical knowledge, and re-subsumption of declarative information. Ohlsson develops the implications of those mechanisms by scaling their effects with respect to time, complexity, and social interaction. The book ends with a unified theory of non-monotonic cognitive change that captures the abstract properties that the three types of change share.
The purpose of the present study was to revise the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale Version 10 (BIS-10), identify the factor structure of the items among normals, and compare their scores on the revised form (BIS-11) with psychiatric inpatients and prison inmates. The scale was administered to 412 college undergraduates, 248 psychiatric inpatients, and 73 male prison inmates. Exploratory principal components analysis of the items identified six primary factors and three second-order factors. The three second-order factors were labeled Attentional Impulsiveness, Motor Impulsiveness, and Nonplanning Impulsiveness. Two of the three second-order factors identified in the BIS-11 were consistent with those proposed by Barratt (1985), but no cognitive impulsiveness component was identified per se. The results of the present study suggest that the total score of the BIS-11 is an internally consistent measure of impulsiveness and has potential clinical utility for measuring impulsiveness among selected patient and inmate populations.
It was long assumed that thinking goes on ‘in the head’: indeed, as recently as twenty years ago, many would have regarded it as absurd to examine thinking with reference to events beyond the brain. The chapters in Cognition Beyond the Brain adopt a different perspective: In thinking, people use dispositions from both sides of the skull. Readily observed phenomena—including neural activity—constitute the object of thinking, which relates conceptually to the construct ‘thinking’. Like all folk concepts, ‘thinking’ is a second-order construct used to ‘explain’ observations or, specifically, how action is—and should be—integrated with perception. As attested in each of the chapters, bodies co-orient to cultural resources while using bidirectional coupling. The focus thus falls on what can be learned about thinking by studying world-side activity. The chapters report empirical, observational and theoretical studies of how people use circumstances (and objects) to act alone, in dyads and in groups. People manage and track attention as they integrate speech and action with gestures, gaze and other bodily activity. In making interactivity part of thinking, a broad range and assortments of parts, procedures and modes of operation are invoked.
The popular iconography of insight casts a thinker as he or she uncoils from a Rodin pose and a bulb that lights a world hitherto hidden. By and large, these features of folk mythology capture and guide how psychologists conduct research on insight: Mental processes — some of which may be unconscious — transform an inceptive abstract representation of the world until it prescribes a fruitful solution to a problem. Yet thinking and problem solving outside the laboratory involve interacting with external resources, and through this interactivity with a material world, solutions are distilled. Still, laboratory work on problem solving pays scant and largely indifferent attention to interactivity: Sometimes problems are presented as riddles or static graphical or diagrammatic images, or sometimes they are accompanied by artefacts that can be manipulated (and sometimes interactivity is possible for some problems but not others within a set of problems over which performance is indiscriminately amalgamated). The research methodology — and indifference to the central role of interactivity in thinking — follows from a deep-seated commitment to mentalism and methodological individualism. However, a thinker is an embodied creature embedded in a physical world: The materiality of external resources and artefacts through which problems manifest themselves inevitably determines a set of action affordances. From a systemic perspective, thinking is traceable along a contingent spatio-temporal itinerary wrought by interactivity and evidenced by changes in the world.
Humans (not just brains) have been evolving as relational self-conscious beings that undergo situated ontogenetic histories and lead creative cognitive lives. More than just evolving (in the restricted Darwinian sense of variation under natural selection), we have been altering our own developmental paths by making and changing the material means by which we engage the world (in a more extensive sense that blends Bergsonian creative evolution with niche-construction). We create things that very often alter the ecology of our minds, re-configure the boundaries of our thinking and the ways we make sense of the world. The plasticity of the mind is embedded and inextricably enfolded with the plasticity of culture – I call that metaplasticity. This ongoing relational transaction at the heart of human becoming has long been recognized in archaeology, philosophy, and anthropology. It also seems natural in view of the way materiality conspicuously envelops our everyday life and thinking. Yet our understanding of the anthropological and evolutionary implications of this seemingly unique human predisposition to reconfigure our bodies and extend our minds is severely constrained by several inherited conceptual splits that structure the way we think about the process of thinking in archaeology, anthropology, and beyond. This article explores how a neuroarchaeology of mind grounded on a theory of material engagement can help us to understand the changing prosthetic alignments (communicative, epistemic, or ontological) between brains, bodies, and things. Doing so, I want to highlight what is typically cast in the shadow and to re-instantiate the cognitive life of things and the priority of material engagement in the making and evolution of human intelligence.
A study was conducted in which 133 participants performed 11 memory tasks (some thought to reflect working memory and some thought to reflect short-term memory), 2 tests of general fluid intelligence, and the Verbal and Quantitative Scholastic Aptitude Tests. Structural equation modeling suggested that short-term and working memories reflect separate but highly related constructs and that many of the tasks used in the literature as working memory tasks reflect a common construct. Working memory shows a strong connection to fluid intelligence, but short-term memory does not. A theory of working memory capacity and general fluid intelligence is proposed: The authors argue that working memory capacity and fluid intelligence reflect the ability to keep a representation active, particularly in the face of interference and distraction. The authors also discuss the relationship of this capability to controlled attention, and the functions of the prefrontal cortex.
Neural reuse is a form of neuroplasticity whereby neural elements originally developed for one purpose are put to multiple uses. A diverse behavioral repertoire is achieved via the creation of multiple, nested, and overlapping neural coalitions, in which each neural element is a member of multiple different coalitions and cooperates with a different set of partners at different times. This has profound implications for how we think about our continuity with other species, for how we understand the similarities and differences between psychological processes, and for how best to pursue a unified science of the mind.
After Phrenology
surveys the terrain and advocates for a series of reforms in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The book argues that, among other things, we should capture brain function in a multi-dimensional manner, develop a new, action-oriented vocabulary for psychology, and recognize that higher-order cognitive processes are built from complex configurations of already evolved circuitry.
The study of insight in problem solving and creative thinking has seen an upsurge of interest in the last 30 years. Current theorising concerning insight has taken one of two tacks. The special-process view, which grew out of the Gestalt psychologists’ theorising about insight, proposes that insight is the result of a dedicated set of processes (the “insight sequence”) that is activated by the individual's reaching impasse while trying to deal with a problematic situation. In contrast, the business-as-usual view argues that insight is brought about by the same processes that underlie ordinary thinking (analytic thinking). Although those two views are typically treated as being in opposition, it has recently been proposed that a complete understanding of insight will require bringing together aspects of both views. The present paper carries that proposal further. Critical analysis of those two viewpoints demonstrates that each has a positive contribution to make to our understanding of insight, but also is unable to deal with certain phenomena. An integrated view of insight is presented and implications are discussed.
Much research in the last 2 decades has demonstrated that humans deviate from normative models of decision making and rational judgment. In 4 studies involving 954 participants, the authors explored the extent to which measures of cognitive ability and thinking dispositions can predict discrepancies from normative responding on a variety of tasks from the heuristics and biases literature including the selection task, belief bias in the syllogistic reasoning, argument evaluation, base-rate use, covariation detection, hypothesis testing, outcome bias, if-only thinking, knowledge calibration, hindsight bias, and on false consensus paradigm. Significant relationships involving cognitive ability were interpreted as indicating algorithmic level limitations on the computation of the normative response. Relationships with thinking dispositions were interpreted as indicating that styles of epistemic regulation can predict individual differences in performance of these tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
To study productive thinking where it is most conspicuous in great achievements is certainly a temptation, and without a doubt, important information about the genesis of productive thought could be found in biographical material. A problem arises when a living creature has a goal but does not know how this goal is to be reached. Whenever one cannot go from the given situation to the desired situation simply by action, then there has to be recourse to thinking. The subjects ( S s), who were mostly students of universities or of colleges, were given various thinking problems, with the request that they think aloud. This instruction, "Think aloud", is not identical with the instruction to introspect which has been common in experiments on thought-processes. While the introspecter makes himself as thinking the object of his attention, the subject who is thinking aloud remains immediately directed to the problem, so to speak allowing his activity to become verbal. It is the shift of function of the components of a complex mathematical pattern—a shift which must so often occur if a certain structure is to be recognized in a given pattern—it is this restructuration, more precisely: this transformation of function within a system, which causes more or less difficulty for thinking, as one individual or another tries to find a mathematical proof.
explore the nature of insightful problem solving / examine the relation between insight abilities and intelligent behavior / present a descriptive theory of insight that takes into account the processes that accompany sudden realizations during problem solving and the role that intelligence plays in the use of these processes
conventional views of insight [the special-process view, the nothing-special view] / theory of selection in insight / new test of the three-process theory / evaluating the three process theory of insight (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
61 subjects were given the task of solving a problem having four possible solutions. "Two cords were hung from the ceiling, and were of such length that they reached the floor. One hung near a wall, the other from the center of the room. The subject was told, 'Your problem is to tie the ends of these two strings together.' He soon learned that if he held either cord in his hand he could not reach the other. He was then told that he could use or do anything he wished." A number of objects which might help in the solution of the problem were present in the room. After each solution had been mastered the subject was told to solve the problem in still another way until all of the solutions had been learned. The trials were timed and introspective reports concerning the means of solution were recorded. A number of hints were given from time to time when the subject failed to reach a solution. The author's conclusions are to the effect that "The perception of the solution of a problem is like the perceiving of a hidden figure in a puzzle-picture. In both cases
(a) the perception is sudden;
(b) there is no conscious intermediate stage; and
(c) the relationships of the elements in the final perceptions are different from those which preceded, i.e., changes in meaning are involved." The author feels that trial and error or association by similarity cannot explain his results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A problematical situation was arranged so that it could be broken into three parts and presented to the subject as three separate experiences. Under these conditions the subjects could not find a solution. "Thus a selected presentation of the experience is not enough. The parts of the experience must be combined in a certain manner and a 'direction' or way the problem is attacked, seems to be a factor which determines the nature of the combination. 'Trial and error' may be present in the attempts at the solution, but is inadequate to explain the sudden appearance of the correct solution, when such solution requires productive rather than reproductive thinking." These results are oriented with respect to the theories of Ach, Selz, Wertheimer, etc. The author favors an explanation in terms of
Gestalt. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Kohler's work first appeared in 1917, under the title
Intelligenzprufen an Anthropoiden. The English translation of the second revised edition, under the title given above, was first published in 1924 and is adapted for this chapter. Two sets of interests lead us to test the intelligence of the higher apes. We are aware that it is a question of beings which in many ways are nearer to man than to the other ape species; in particular it has been shown that the chemistry of their bodies, in so far as it may be perceived in the quality of the blood, and the structure of their most highly-developed organ, the brain, are more closely related to the chemistry of the human body and human brain-structure than to the chemical nature of the lower apes and their brain development. These beings show so many human traits in their "everyday" behaviour that the question naturally arises whether they do not behave with intelligence and insight under conditions which require such behaviour. This question expresses the first, one may say, naive, interest in the intellectual capacity of animals. We wished to ascertain the degree of relationship between anthropoid apes and man in a field which seems to us particularly important, but on which we have as yet little information. The second aim is theoretical. Even assuming that the anthropoid ape behaves intelligently in the sense in which the word is applied to man, there is yet from the very start no doubt that he remains in this respect far behind man, becoming perplexed and making mistakes in relatively simple situations; but it is precisely for this reason that we may, under the simplest conditions, gain knowledge of the nature of intelligent acts. In the field of the experiments carried out here the insight of the chimpanzee shows itself to be principally determined by his optical apprehension of the situation; at times he even starts solving problems from a too visual point of view, and in many cases in which the chimpanzee stops acting with insight, it may have been simply that the structure of the situation was too much for his visual grasp (relative "weakness of form perception"). It is therefore difficult to give a satisfactory explanation of all his performances, so long as no detailed theory of form (Gestalt) has been laid as a foundation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena in context. In particular, it points to the web of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem. At least three fields were taking a deeply ecological approach to cognition 30 years ago: Gibson’s ecological psychology, Bateson’s ecology of mind, and Soviet cultural-historical activity theory. The ideas developed in those projects have now found a place in modern views of embodied, situated, distributed cognition. As cognitive theory continues to shift from units of analysis defined by inherent properties of the elements to units defined in terms of dynamic patterns of correlation across elements, the study of cognitive ecosystems will become an increasingly important part of cognitive science.
The Wason 2-4-6 task was embedded in a practical reasoning scenario where number sequences had well-defined utilities in the process of achieving a goal. Reasoners' hypothesis-testing behavior was clearly goal-driven and was significantly influenced by whether the utilities favored positive or negative sequences. In the version of the scenario where generating positive sequences had greater benefits than generating negative ones, participants performed poorly at the task as measured by their ability to guess the correct rule and by the nature and number of triples tested before making an announcement. In contrast, the scenario that assigned a greater utility to the production of negative sequences fostered significantly more diligent and creative hypothesis-testing behavior, and participants were significantly more likely to discover the rule. These results suggest that the poor performance observed in Wason's traditional 2-4-6 task reflects a hypothesis-testing process that by default assigns greater utility to the production of sequences that conform to the initial triple, and hence receive positive feedback. However, reasoners are not averse to producing negative sequences, and understand their implication, if their utility is made relevant in the process of achieving goals.
This paper describes the process of attaining the insight required to solve a particular problem—the Mutilated Checkerboard (MC) problem. It shows that attaining insight requires discovering an effective problem representation, and that performance on insight problems can be predicted from the availability of generators and constraints in the search for such a representation. To test these claims we varied the salience of features leading to the critical concept of parity in the MC problem. Using chronometric measures, verbal protocols, and computer simulations, we explored first why it is difficult to find a representation for the Checkerboard problem, and then tested four potential sources of search constraint for reducing the difficulty: cue salience manipulations, prior knowledge, hints, and heuristics. While subjects used each of these four sources of constraint, a particular heuristic—noticing properties of the situation that remained invariant during solution attempts (the Notice Invariants heuristic)—proved to be a particularly powerful means for focusing search. In conjunction with hints and independently, it played a major part in producing the insight that yielded an effective problem representation and solution.
In this article we propose a theoretical framework of distributed representations and a methodology of representational analysis for the study of distributed cognitive tasks—tasks that require the processing of information distributed across the internal mind and the external environment. The basic principle of distributed representations Is that the representational system of a distributed cognitive task is a set of internal and external representations, which together represent the abstract structure of the task. The basic strategy of representational analysis is to decompose the representation of a hierarchical task into its component levels so that the representational properties at each level can be independently examined. The theoretical framework and the methodology are used to analyze the hierarchical structure of the Tower of Hanoi problem. Based on this analysis, four experiments are designed to examine the representational properties of the Tower of Hanoi. Finally, the nature of external representations is discussed.
Recent philosophy of science has seen a number of attempts to understand scientific models by looking to theories of fiction. In previous work, I have offered an account of models that draws on Kendall Walton's 'make-believe' theory of art. According to this account, models function as 'props' in games of make-believe, like children's dolls or toy trucks. In this paper, I assess the make-believe view through an empirical study of molecular models. I suggest that the view gains support when we look at the way that these models are used and the attitude that users take towards them. Users' interaction with molecular models suggests that they do imagine the models to be molecules, in much the same way that children imagine a doll to be a baby. Furthermore, I argue, users of molecular models imagine themselves viewing and manipulating molecules, just as children playing with a doll might imagine themselves looking at a baby or feeding it. Recognising this 'participation' in modelling, I suggest, points towards a new account of how models are used to learn about the world, and helps us to understand the value that scientists sometimes place on three-dimensional, physical models over other forms of representation.
This paper briefly introduces radical embodied cognitive science (RECS) and places it in historical perspective. Radical embodied cognitive science is an interdisciplinary approach to psychology that combines ideas from the phenomenological tradition with ecological psychology and dynamical systems modeling. It is argued that radical embodied cognitive science has a long history; it is as a direct descendent of the Jamesian functionalist approach to psychology. This approach to psychology is contrasted with the current trend of supplementing standard cognitive psychology with occasional references to the body. In contrast with these trends, radical embodied cognitive science is skeptical of the explanatory usefulness of mental representations. The future prospects of radical embodied cognitive science and the broader functionalist framework are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
Contemporary discussions of art and technology continue to work on the assumption that making entails the imposition of form upon the material world, by an agent with a design in mind. Against this hylomorphic model of creation, I argue that the forms of things arise within fields of force and flows of material. It is by intervening in these force-fields and following the lines of flow that practitioners make things. In this view, making is a practice of weaving, in which practitioners bind their own pathways or lines of becoming into the texture of material flows comprising the lifeworld. Rather than reading creativity 'backwards', from a finished object to an initial intention in the mind of an agent, this entails reading it forwards, in an ongoing generative movement that is at once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic. To illustrate what this means in practice, I compare carpentry and drawing. In both cases, making is a matter of finding the grain of the world's becoming and following its course. Historically, it was the turn from drawing lines to pulling them straight, between predetermined points, which marked the transition from the textilic to the architectonic, debasing the former as craft while elevating the latter as technology. Copyright The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.
Short title on half-title page: Memory and the medial temporal region of the brain. Thesis (Ph. D.)--McGill University, 1972. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-78). Microfilm of typescript.
The asymptotic Pearson's chi-squared test and Fisher's exact test have long been the most used for testing association in 2x2 tables. Unconditional tests preserve the significance level and generally are more powerful than Fisher's exact test for moderate to small samples, but previously were disadvantaged by being computationally demanding. This disadvantage is now moot, as software to facilitate unconditional tests has been available for years. Moreover, Fisher's exact test with mid-p adjustment gives about the same results as an unconditional test. Consequently, several better tests are available, and the choice of a test should depend only on its merits for the application involved. Unconditional tests and the mid-p approach ought to be used more than they now are. The traditional Fisher's exact test should practically never be used.
In the 2-4-6 rule discovery task, reasoners seek to discover a rule that governs the arrangement of three numbers (or triple). The to-be-discovered rule is "ascending numbers". Upon being given the triple 2-4-6 as an initial example, however, reasoners tend to formulate algebraically specific hypotheses. Traditionally, this task is conducted primarily from an internal representation of the triples and candidate hypotheses. More recently, substantial representational effects have been demonstrated wherein an external representation of the dimensions of the problem space facilitated successful rule discovery. In the two experiments reported here, an interactive graphical representation was created by concurrently plotting each triple produced by the participants. In Experiment 1, participants who performed the task with this external representation were more likely to discover the rule than were a group of control participants. Experiment 2 replicated the effect but also assessed participants' hypotheses for each triple generated. Results indicated that a graphical representation of the triples fostered the development of hypotheses that were less constrained by the implied algebraic specificity of the initial triple.