Zhang Zhonglu, Yang Ke, Warren Christopher M, Zhao Guang, Li Peng, Lei Yi, Li Hong
Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University Dalian, China.
College of Educational Science, Chengdu Normal University Chengdu, China.
Front Psychol. 2015 Jul 23;6:1025. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01025. eCollection 2015.
Chunk decomposition is an aspect of problem solving that involves decomposing a pattern into its component parts in order to regroup them into a new pattern. Previous work suggests that the primary source of difficulty in chunk decomposition is whether a problem's solution requires removing a part that is a meaningful perceptual pattern (termed a chunk) or not (a non-chunk). However, the role of spatial overlap (crossed relation or not) has been ignored in this line of research. Here, we dissociated the role of element type and crossed relation in chunk decomposition problems by employing a Chinese character transformation task. We replicated the finding that when the to-be-removed element is a non-chunk, the problem is more difficult to solve than when the element is a chunk. However, this result held only if the elements had no crossed relation. Relative to non-crossed relation, problems that involved removing elements that overlapped with the remaining character were more difficult to solve irrespective of the element type. We conclude that both element type and crossed relation can cause the difficulty of chunk decomposition and crossed relation plays more important role in preventing people from finding insightful ways to decompose chunk relative to element type.
组块分解是问题解决的一个方面，它涉及将一种模式分解为其组成部分，以便将它们重新组合成一种新的模式。先前的研究表明，组块分解中困难的主要来源在于问题的解决方案是否需要移除一个作为有意义的知觉模式（称为组块）的部分，或者不是（非组块）。然而，在这一研究领域中，空间重叠（交叉关系与否）的作用一直被忽视。在这里，我们通过使用汉字转换任务来区分元素类型和交叉关系在组块分解问题中的作用。我们重复了这一发现，即当要移除的元素是非组块时，问题比该元素是组块时更难解决。然而，只有当元素没有交叉关系时，这一结果才成立。相对于非交叉关系，无论元素类型如何，涉及移除与剩余字符重叠的元素的问题都更难解决。我们得出结论，元素类型和交叉关系都可能导致组块分解的困难，并且相对于元素类型，交叉关系在阻止人们找到有洞察力的组块分解方法方面起着更重要的作用。
