The Embodiment Study Of The Insight Problem Solving

Embodied cognitive theory suggests that human’s cognitive processing is based on the interactions between the body and the environment. A large number of empirical studies show that the body activities and body content can affect individual’s social perception, language understanding, as well as memory and other cognitive activities. Some researchers believe that creative thinking is also affected by human’s body and body content. But the research of the embodiment of creative thinking is difficult to perform because of the complexity of the thinking process and difficulties in action controlling. More work is needed here and thus can be done on this.Insight problem is one of the most typical forms in researching human’s creative thinking process. Choosing two kinds of insight problem——the spatial insight problem and the semantic insight problem, with behavior experiment methods and ERPs techniques, this thesis, which covers 3 studies and 8 experiments, systematically explores the affecting factors, cognitive mechanisms and neural mechanism of the body activity and body content in solving the insight problems.Study 1 concerns the effect of body movement on the classic "nine-dot" insight problem solving, and the factors of this influence with 3 experiments. Experiment 1 examines whether the body movements with music beat can guide people solving the classic "nine-dot" problem. The result shows that the first beat movement from the bottom-left-condition to the top-right-condition which is the same direction to drawing a diagonal line in the "nine-dot" problem can promote participants selecting the bottom-left-dot as the starting point and helping them to solve the problem correctly. Experiment 2 is to see whether opposite-direction action can help solve the problem correctly. It shows that action direction which is opposite to the writing habit can still make the subjects start from the opposite direction, thus solving the problem. It rules out the hypothesis of experiment 1 that the improved efficiency of insight problem solving is caused by the writing habit but not the action. Experiment 3 aims to testify whether the mixed embodied information can guide participants solving insight problems better or not. Experiment 3a guides participants’eyes" movement with a video of embodied metaphor clue. It turns out that an embodied metaphor clue which implies to extend the lines outside in the video can promote peoples’ performance of the problem solving. Experiment 3b gives participants two key heuristic information (the first draw is a diagonal line; the line must extend to the outside) in the action tips. It shows that the performance of participants in the mixed clue group is better than that of participants in the group which contains only one kind of key heuristic information.Study 2 has two experiments. It looks into the visual-spatial working memory’s effect on people solving the insight problem with eye guidance movement with the Duncker radiation problem which contains key embodied heuristic information as the experimental materials. Experiment 4 uses different tasks to interfere in participants’ spatial working memory and object working memory respectively before their solving of the problem. The result suggests that either spatial working memory or object working memory, if interfered with, affects participants’success rate of Duncker radiation problem solving. What’s more, the performance of participants whose spatial working memories are interfered is worse than that of participants whose object working memories are interfered. Experiment 5 uses OISQ-R (Object-Spatial Imagery Questionnaire-Revision) to distinguish participants’visual-spatial cognitive types at first. Then it requires participants to solve the Duncker radiation task which contains key embodied heuristic information. The result shows that the performance of spatial-object visualizers is the best; the performance of the spatial visualizers is much better than that of the object visualizers.Study 3 explores the individual’s embodied experience in solving remote association problems with three experiments. Experiment 6 examines the effects of Action Semantics clue words on RAT with variant remote association test tasks. The three clue words of RAT of Experiment 6 involve action sense and abstract sense respectively. And the result shows that participants’performance of solving RAT with clue words involving action sense is much better than the performance of those who solve RAT with clue words involving abstract sense. Experiment 7 shows that when the clue words with action sense appear inconsistently, the performance of participants solving the RAT is worse than the performance when the action clue words are coherent. With ERPs technology, experiment 8 first divides participants into an active group and an inactive group. Then participants are required to image the action or the visual information of a same object (which is related to the answer words) respectively before they start to solve the RAT. The behavior observation shows that participants solving the RAT with action information imagination have better success rate and faster reaction time. And the results of ERPs show that participants in the active group solving the RAT with action information imaging have a bigger P3 wave than when they solve the RAT with object information imaging. But in the inactive group, there is no significant difference.Hence, this research concludes that:(1) Relevant action can lead individuals to completing insight problem solving. (2)Mixed embodied information promotes people’s performance of insight problem solving. (3)Visual-spatial working memory mediates interactions between eyes’movement and classical problem solving.The influence of spatial working memory is bigger than the influence of object working memory. (4)There are individual differences in solving the insight problem which involves the key embodied heuristic information. Different cognitive types of participants have different results. (5) The abundance of action semantic information and their spatial closeness of the semantic insight problem contribute to the problem solving. (6) Action imaging promotes the solving of RAT with action information. And active participants can have a bigger P3 wave.