The Mechanism Of Key Heuristic Information Detection In Prototype Elicitation Paradigm

Insight problem solving, usually caused by heuristic strategy, was regarded as creative thinking under experiment condition. The heuristic theory of prototypal matters proposed by Professor Zhang Qinglin was that insight problem solving depended on the processes of "prototypal events activation" and "key heuristic information activation". In this research, we studied the activation rates of prototypal events when the subjects faced two kinds of prototypal events, the information content of which were different in quantity.In experiment 1, twenty scientific inventions-creations problems were selected in the standard scientific inventions-creations problems bank organized by Zhang’s team. Among them, no changes were made in ten scientific inventions-creations problems, and they were marked as the simple -prototypal events-problems (SPEP). Another ten scientific inventions-creations problems matched with the SPEP in difficulty index were named as the redundant-prototypal events-problems (RPEP). The prototypal events of RPEP were enriched with irrelevant information, which would interrupt the subject to detect the key heuristic information. Oral report method was used to explore the relationship between the activation rate of question and the detection rate of the key information in prototypal events/both prototypal events and problems in RPEP condition and EPRP condition. The result shows that the activation rate of question was positively related with the detection rate of the key information in prototypal events/both prototypal events and problems in two conditions. There was significant difference in activation rate of question, detection rate of the key information in prototypal events/both prototypal events and problems in both two conditions between RPEP condition and EPRP condition.In experiment 2, VBM was used to explore the differences and similarities in brain structure which associated with the activation rate of question in the above two conditions. The brain data inferred that the activation rate of question was positively related with the volume in right middle temporal gyrus under SPEP condition, in right superior temporal gyrus under RPEP condition.In conclusion, the question activation was positively related with the detection of the key heuristic information, and the association between the key information in prototypal events and questions was the significant process in problem solving. In addition, the association between the question activation and the enlarged volume in temporal gyrus which might suggest that question activation in insight problems solving was related with semantic processing.