Probing the Cognitive Mechanism of Mental Representational Change During Chunk Decomposition: A Parametric fMRI Study

Abstract

Chunk decomposition plays an important role in cognitive flexibility in particular with regards to representational change, which is critical for insight problem solving and creative thinking. In this study, we investigated the cognitive mechanism of decomposing Chinese character chunks through a parametric fMRI design. Our results from this parametric manipulation revealed widely distributed activations in frontal, parietal, and occipital cortex and negative activations in parietal and visual areas in response to chunk tightness during decomposition. To mentally manipulate the element of a given old chunk, superior parietal lobe appears to support element restructuring in a goal-directed way, whereas the negatively activated inferior parietal lobe may support preventing irrelevant objects from being attended. Moreover, determining alternative ways of restructuring requires a constellation of frontal areas in the cognitive control network, such as the right lateral prefrontal cortex in inhibiting the predominant chunk representations, the presupplementary motor area in initiating a transition of mental task set, and the inferior frontal junction in establishing task sets. In conclusion, this suggests that chunk decomposition reflects mental transformation of problem representation from an inappropriate state to a new one alongside with an evaluation of novel and insightful solutions by the caudate in the dorsal striatum.

Event-related potentials support a dual process account of the Embedded Chinese Character Task

“…The behavioral data showed that participants were faster on tasks requiring a Type 1 strategy for automatic chunk decomposition than when Type 2 deliberate chunk decomposition was required. This replicated previous findings that show differences in response times for different chunk decomposition strategies (Tang et al, 2016;Wu et al, 2013;Zhang et al, 2015). These results also replicated previous studies showing that the characters hypothesized as requiring automatic processes were solved more quickly than those hypothesized requiring deliberate processes.…”

“…Chunk decomposition tasks that are reliant on either automatic or deliberative processing avoids the complexity of distinguishing the products of two processes that occur in the conflict problems typically used in tests of dual process theory. Chunk decomposition tasks require participants to decompose their mental representations into their component elements to form an alternative representation (Tang et al, 2016). Chunk decomposition tasks are simple but ingenious, as they guide participants into using either automatic or deliberate processing.…”

“…In Chinese Character decomposition tasks there are two decomposed conditions -automatic (loose) chunk decomposition, where participants decompose the character into separate radicals and deliberate (tight) chunk decomposition condition, where the problem can only be solved if the character is decomposed into strokes 1 . Most psycholinguistic models have assumed that radicals are represented in a Chinese reader's mental lexicon (long-term memory) and are used in character processing (Luo, Niki, & Knoblich, 2006;Tang et al, 2016;Wu, Knoblich, & Luo, 2013;Wu et al, 2009). Moreover, previous studies suggest that orthographic and semantic information at radical levels are activated simultaneously (Xu, Chang, & Perfetti, 2014).…”

“…There is much evidence that Chinese readers actively use positional (orthographic) as well as semantic information of radicals in visual character recognition. It is challenging to disentangle the use of positional and semantic regularity in character recognition given that both of them are included within radicals (Tang et al, 2016;Tong & Yip, 2014;Xu et al, 2014), but both are elements of an automatic process. In the first example, they are able to decompose "支" into two meaningful parts: radical "十" and character "又" automatically based on positional information as well as the semantic information related to experience of reading Chinese characters.…”

Role of Creativity in the Effectiveness of Cognitive Reappraisal

“…Accordingly, we proposed a “representational change account” for cognitive reappraisal specific to a given unpleasant situation (such as viewing a negative IAPS picture). Ohlsson and Knoblich established representational change theory for creative insight problem solving, which suggests that problem solvers initially have a low probability of success because they retrieve inappropriate knowledge and set unnecessary constraints on the problem and that only when they break these inappropriate mental sets and establish a new but suitable representation of the problem can they have success in a seemingly unsolvable insight problem ( Ohlsson, 1984 , 1992 ; Knoblich et al, 1999 , 2001 ; Luo et al, 2006 ; Wu et al, 2009 , 2013 ; Huang et al, 2015 ; Tang et al, 2016 ). It is reasonable for us to propose that similar processes can also occur in cognitive reappraisal’s regulation of emotion: when encountering an apparently unpleasant stimulus, such as a picture of vomitus, people’s initial feeling or intuitive emotional response can be disgust; only when they have restructured the situation and given the scene a new meaning (for instance, reinterpreting the vomitus as a sign of pregnancy for a woman who wants to have a baby) can these negative feelings be altered.…”