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Examining the Cognitive Neural Basis of Insight Problem Solving with Chinese Character Decomposition Task
Poster A28 in Poster Session A, Thursday, October 6, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Dun-Ya Hu1, Hsin-Chin Chen2, Jyotsna Vaid1; 1Texas A&M University, 2National Chung Cheng University
Insight, “a sudden change in the concept or other form of knowledge representation which often leads to the solution of the problem” (p.73, Beeman & Kounios, 2014), is usually linked to the performance of creative thinking. For decades, researchers tried to establish its psychological nature and neural basis. Two paradigms, the remote associates test (RAT) and the chunk decomposition task (CDT), have been proposed to examine insight processing and incongruent results were found. One of the main issues of these tasks was the difficulty in separating analytic and insightful processes in participants’ responses. The present study extended from previous tasks and proposed a new Chinese character decomposition task to examine the cognitive neural mechanism of insight problem solving. Taking the advantage that most Chinese characters can be decomposed by different strategies of stroke patterns, it is possible to differentiate analytic and insightful solutions. In the Chinese character decomposition task, participants were asked to find a hidden Chinese character of a specific category (e.g., animals) within a more complex Chinese character. Whereas a solution of the independent radical (e.g., find “犬”, a dog, in “哭”, means cry) suggested the analytic solution, that of the embedded hidden character indicated the insightful solution (e.g., find “虫”, a bug, in “寓”, means apartment). Fifty-nine native Chinese readers were recruited and were asked to find a hidden character in the to-be decomposed character in the Chinese character decomposition task, with their blood flow changes in ROIs, including middle frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobules, superior parietal lobules, and temporal lobes in both hemispheres, monitored with functional near infra-red spectroscopy (fNIRS). Three experimental conditions, i.e., analytic, insightful, and control conditions, were manipulated. The fNIRS data were preprocessed and analyzed with GLM applying nirsLAB software (NIRx Inc.). The results found stronger blood flow changes in the right supramarginal gyrus/inferior parietal lobule in the insightful condition. These brain areas has frequently been associated with creative thinking in previous studies, suggesting that insight problem solving may share similar mechanisms of other higher-order cognitive abilities as proposed by previous studies applying RAT (e.g, Beeman et al., 2004), rather than semantic or visual-spatial processes suggested in previous studies applying CDT (e.g., Huang et al., 2015; Lin et al., 2018). In conclusion, the present study provided a new and promising strategy to further explore the underlying cognitive processing and neural correlates of insight problem solving.
Topic Areas: Morphology, Multilingualism