The Effect of Working Memory Updating Ability on Spatial Insight Problem Solving: Evidence From Behavior and Eye Movement Studies

Abstract

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It still remains uncertain whether working memory updating ability influences spatial insight problem solving and whether working memory updating ability plays a role in the representation restructuring phase. The current study explored the correlation of working memory updating ability and spatial insight problem solving by behavior and eye movement experiments, and the results showed that high working memory updating ability individuals spend significant shorter time to solve spatial insight problem than low working memory updating ability individuals. For participants with high or low working memory updating ability, the underlying mechanism of spatial insight problem solving is sudden rather than incremental, which demonstrated that the working memory updating ability did not influence the representation restructuring phase. Working memory updating ability influences spatial problem solving, and it works critically in the problem space search phase, while the restructuring phase is sudden and immediate, which is not influenced by working memory updating ability. The representation restructuring tends to be spontaneous.

Keywords

• working memory updating
• problem solving
• insight
• representation restructuring
• eye movement