The Development Of Different Cognitive Styles Of Individual Insight Problem Solving

Insight is one of the most important processes in creative thinking. Now the research of insight has received considerable attention in creative thinking. There were a lot of differences about the mechanism of insight problem solving (IPS). By using two kinds of heuristic information, the mechanism of IPS was discussed and the role of age and cognitive style were explored.This research includes three experiments. In experiment 1 and 3, the match arithmetic problem was used, and in experiment 2, the Siqiaoban problem was used.The participants of experiment 1 and 2 were same; there were 69 junior school students, 63 senior high school students and 59 college students. We measured the time of insight in order to discuss the mechanism of IPS and find out the characteristic of grades and individual differences.The experiment 3 involved 59 college students. The ASL 504 eye tracker was used to investigate the on-line process of IPS. Many eye movement indexes were analyzed, such as, total fixation time; fixation count; mean fixation duration and pupil diameter.The results showed that:Firstly, the match arithmetic problem was easier to solve than the Siqiaoban problem. When adolescents solved match arithmetic problem, the ability of insight problem solving of college students was higher than those of middle school students; when adolescents solved Siqiaoban problem, the ability of insight problem solving of older people was higher than those of younger people.Secondly, the characteristic of people's on-line process was that solvers preferred to fixating operators, and solvers who done it successfully paid more attention to the key components.Thirdly, Compared to field dependence(FD) solvers, field independence(FI) solvers spend less time in solving insight problems, and they less depended on heuristic information in solving insight problem.Fourthly, mechanism of IPS supported representational change theory.