Dissociable stages of problem solving (I): temporal characteristics revealed by eye-movement analyses.
Understanding the functional neuroanatomy of planning and problem solving may substantially benefit from better insight into the chronology of the cognitive processes involved. Based on the assumption that regularities in cognitive processing are reflected in overtly observable eye-movement patterns, here we recorded eye movements while participants worked on Tower of London (TOL) problems that comprised an experimental manipulation of different task demands. Single-trial saccade-locked analyses revealed that higher demands on forming an internal problem representation were associated with an increased number of gaze alternations between start state and goal state, but did not show any effect on the durations of these inspections of the states. In contrast, higher demands on actual planning in terms of mental manipulations of working memory contents coincided with a prolonged duration of the very last inspection of the start state (i.e., immediately preceding movement execution) but did not show any effect on the number of gaze alterations. Differential task demands on internalization and planning processes during problem solving hence selectively affect different eye-movement parameters. Moreover, these findings complement previous neuroimaging data on dissociable contributions of left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in problem solving with novel evidence for a corresponding dissociation in the eye-movement patterns reflecting the associated cognitive processes.
Department of Neurology, University Medical Center, Freiburg, Germany.
Kai
K
Nitschke
Nina
N
Ruh
Sonja
S
Kappler
Christoph
C
Stahl
Christoph P
CP
Kaller
D000328:Adult; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D011340:Problem Solving / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors