Decomposing a Chunk into Its Elements and Reorganizing Them As a New Chunk: The Two Different Sub-processes Underlying Insightful Chunk Decomposition

The involvement of decomposition and composition processes in restructuring during problem solving

Decomposition of chunks has been widely accepted as a critical proxy of restructuring, but the role of composition in forming new representations has been largely neglected. This study aims to investigate the roles of both decomposition and composition processes in chunk restructuring, as well as their relationships with "aha" experiences during problem-solving. Participants were asked to move a part of a character to another character to create two new characters. Across three experiments, the characters to be decomposed or composed were varied in terms of tight or loose chunks. The results showed that decomposition or composition of tight chunks led to lower success rates, longer response times, and significantly stronger "Aha!" emotional experiences (mainly in terms of surprise and suddenness). This study provides evidence for the contribution of both decomposition and composition processes to restructuring in creative insight.

Temporal expectations mediated the repetition effect in a sequence in two ways

The repetition priming effect generally refers to facilitated responding in instances where the same stimulus or a very similar stimulus repeats after an initial occurrence. Prior studies showed that the repetition priming effect was greater when repetitive stimuli appeared at expected times than when they appeared at less expected times. However, in addition to the expectation for repetition, the expectation for nonrepetitive stimuli may also arise in a sequence, especially after repetitive stimuli continuously appeared several times. This study was designed to further reveal how these two kinds of expectations influence the repetition effect in a sequence. Participants were asked to solve 3, 4 or 5 repetitive tasks followed by a novel task in the experimental group, a situation where the expectations for repetitive events arise in the first three serial positions but that for nonrepetitive events arise in the fourth, fifth and sixth serial positions, or were asked to continuously solve 3-5 repetitive tasks in the control group, a situation where only the expectation for repetitive events appears. The results showed that the repetition effect appeared steadily in the whole sequence for the control group, whereas the repetition effect appeared in the early serial positions but was reduced in the later serial position for the experimental group. The findings revealed the dual influences of temporal expectations on repetition effects in a sequence.

The effect of abstract inter-chunk relationships on serial-order control

Hierarchical control is often thought to dissect a complex task space into isolated subspaces in order to eliminate interference. Yet, there is also evidence from serial-order control tasks that our cognitive system can make use of abstract relationships between different parts (chunks) of a sequence. Past evidence in this regard was limited to situations with ordered stimuli (e.g., numbers or positions) that may have aided the detection of relationships and allowed gradual learning and hypothesis testing. Therefore, we used a modified task-span paradigm (with no ordered elements between tasks) in which participants performed memorized sequences of tasks that were encoded in terms of separate chunks of three tasks each. To allow examination of learning effects, each sequence was "cycled" through repeatedly. Importantly, we compared sequences whose chunks were governed by a common, abstract grammar with sequences whose chunks were governed by different grammars. Experiment 1 examined the effect of relationships between shared-element chunks (e.g., ABB-BAA vs. ABB-BAB), Experiment 2 and 3 between different-element chunks (e.g., ABA-CDC vs. ABA-CCD), and Experiment 4 examined second-order relationships (e.g., ABA-ABB--CDC-CDD vs. ABA-ABB--CDC-CCD). Robust evidence in favor of beneficial effects of abstract inter-chunk relationships was obtained across all four experiments. Importantly, these effects were at least as strong in initial cycles of performing a given sequence as during later cycles, suggesting that the cognitive system operates with an "expectation of abstract relationships," rather than benefitting from them through gradual learning. We discuss the implications of these results for models of hierarchical control.

Quantifying the roles of conscious and unconscious processing in insight-related memory effectiveness within standard and creative advertising

To maximize marketing effectiveness, many conscious and unconscious elements are simultaneously employed within campaign advertising. However, little is known about the individual contributions that conscious and unconscious processes make to the cognitive effectiveness of creative advertisements, some of which may also induce insight experiences. To quantify the roles of conscious and unconscious processes in memory effectiveness within commercial advertising, a dual-process, signal-detection technique was adopted to separate the contributions of conscious recollection and unconscious discrimination induced by 80 printed advertisements, among which half were considered standard and the other half creative. A total of 51 participants completed immediate (5 min later) and delayed (3 days later) memory recognition tests. In contrast to standard advertising, creative advertising was found to enhance recognition and to demonstrate advantages in both conscious and unconscious memory, which decreased across the test-time intervals. Further analyses showed that a moment of insight induced by an advertisement, regardless of whether it is standard or creative, can consolidate unconscious memory, whereas advertisements that do not induce insight improve conscious memory. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Unconditional Perseveration of the Short-Term Mental Set in Chunk Decomposition

A mental set generally refers to the brain's tendency to stick with the most familiar solution to a problem and stubbornly ignore alternatives. This tendency is likely driven by previous knowledge (the long-term mental set) or is a temporary by-product of procedural learning (the short-term mental set). A similar problem situation is considered the factor required for perseveration of the long-term mental set, which may not be essential for the short-term mental set. To reveal the boundary conditions for perseveration of the short-term mental set, this study adopted a Chinese character decomposition task. Participants were asked to perform a practice problem that could be solved by a familiar loose chunk decomposition (loose solution) followed by a test problem, or they were asked to repeatedly perform 5-8practice problems followed by a test problem; the former is the base-set condition, and the latter is the enhanced-set condition. In Experiment 1, the test problem situation appeared to be similar to the practice problem and could be solved using the reinforced loose solution and also an unfamiliar tight chunk decomposition (tight solution) (a 2-solution problem). In Experiment 2, the test problem situation differed from the practice problem and could only be solved using an unfamiliar tight solution (a 1-solution problem). The results showed that, when comparing the enhanced-set and base-set conditions, both the accuracy rate and the response times for solving the test problem with a tight solution were worse in Experiment 1, whereas the response times were worse in Experiment 2. We concluded that perseveration of the short-term mental set was independent of the similarity between problem situations and discuss the differences in perseveration between two types of fixation.

The Mnemonic Effects of Novelty and Appropriateness in Creative Chunk Decomposition Tasks

Creativeness has been widely recognized as the ability to generate thoughts that are both novel (new) and appropriate (useful) (Barron, 1955). In this paper, we investigated the mnemonic effects of novelty and appropriateness in chunk decomposition tasks. Studies 1 and 2 utilized classical recognition tasks (explicit memory) and ambiguous word identification tasks (implicit memory) to reveal whether novelty and appropriateness are involved in different mnemonic systems. A 2 (familiarity) × 2 (appropriateness) experimental design was utilized in our experiments, and the four conditions were familiar-appropriate, familiar-inappropriate, novel-appropriate and novel-inappropriate. The results indicated that insight induced by novelty (novel-appropriate condition) has a better performance than other conditions; and further, found an interesting phenomenon of Zeigarnik-like effect which referred to remembering uncompleted tasks better than completed tasks (Zeigarnik, 1927). We further conducted Study 3 to ask participants to recall the encoding process (how the characters had been decomposed in the learning stage), which was more sensitive to Zeigarnik effect and indicated that performance of familiar-appropriate condition (uncompleted tasks) was better than other conditions.