Unified theories of cognition
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence - Special volume on computational research on interaction and agency, part 2
Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
Human Problem Solving
Memory representations in natural tasks
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Spontaneous eye movements during visual imagery reflect the content of the visual scene
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Guiding Attention Produces Inferences in Diagram-Based Problem Solving
DIAGRAMS '02 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Diagrammatic Representation and Inference
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Intersensorial summation as a nonlinear contribution to cerebral excitation
IWANN'03 Proceedings of the Artificial and natural neural networks 7th international conference on Computational methods in neural modeling - Volume 1
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
In this paper, we describe a novel approach to the study of problem solving involving the detailed analysis of natural scanning eye movements during the "one-touch" Tower-of-London (TOL) task. We showed subjects a series of pictures depicting two arrangements of colored balls in pockets within the upper and lower halves of a computer display. The task was to plan (but not to execute) the shortest movement sequence required to rearrange the balls in one half of the display (the Workspace) to match the arrangement in the opposite half (the Goalspace) and indicate the minimum number of moves required for problem solution. We report that subjects are more likely to look towards the Goalspace in the initial period after picture presentation, but bias gaze towards the Workspace during the middle of trials. Towards the end of a trial, subjects are once again more likely to fixate the Goalspace. This pattern is found regardless of whether the subjects solve problems by rearranging the balls in the lower or upper visual fields, demonstrating that this strategy correlates with discrete phases in problem solving. A second experiment showed that efficient planners direct their gaze selectively towards the problem critical balls in the Workspace. In contrast, individuals who make errors spend more time looking at irrelevant items and are strongly influenced by the movement strategy needed to solve the preceding problem. We conclude that efficient solution of the TOL requires the capacity to generate and flexibly shift between control sets, including those underlying ocular scanning. The role of working memory and the prefrontal cerebral cortex in the task are discussed.