People got lost in solving a set of similar problems

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Mental sets describe the brain's tendency to persist with familiar solutions.
• This persistence can hinder the adoption of alternative strategies, even when the familiar approach is ineffective.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how a familiar but invalid solution impacts the ability to adopt an unfamiliar, correct solution.
• To explore the neural mechanisms underlying this "mental set" effect in problem-solving.

Main Methods:

• A Chinese character decomposition task was used with two conditions: base-set and enhanced-set.
• Participants performed practice problems solvable by a familiar loose chunk decomposition (LCD) before a test problem requiring tight chunk decomposition (TCD).
• Brain activation was monitored using fMRI, focusing on the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), middle occipital cortex (MOG), superior parietal lobule (SPL), and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC).

Main Results:

• The test problem elicited greater activation in IFG, MOG, SPL, and dACC compared to the practice problem, indicating increased cognitive load.
• In the enhanced-set condition, greater activation in IFG, SPL, and dACC was observed during verification, alongside reduced activation in left IFG and MOG during exploration.
• This suggests reduced exploration and increased effort to overcome the persistent, invalid LCD solution.

Conclusions:

• People lose the ability to identify errors in familiar but invalid solutions.
• This leads to attentional bias and competition, decreasing exploration and increasing processing demands for alternative solutions.
• The findings explain the "dilemma of creative problem solving" where ingrained habits impede innovation.