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answer of the cell marked with '?'. It was a 2
2 designed experiment with two
2-level factors: steps (1-step vs. 2-steps) and complexity (simple vs. complex).
There are totally four types of tasks, in a task of 1-step, participants only needed
to find the answer of the cell with a mark '?' (e.g., Figure 1(a) and 1(b)); while
in a task of 2-steps, participants had to find the answer of the cell with mark
'*' before they could find the answer of the cell with mark '?' (e.g., Figure 1(c)
and 1(d)). On the other hand, in a simple task, the participants only needed
to check one column, one row, or one box to find the answer for '?' (see Figure
1(a) for an example of only checking one box needed); but in a complex task,
the participants had to check column and row and/or box (see Figure 1(b) for
an example). These tasks had little differences in vision stimuli, but had great
differences in the problem solving processes, such as, problem representation and
memory retrieval for heuristics.
×
1
2
3
2
1
2
*
2
4
?
2
4
?
4
?
2
4
*
1
1
3
3
3
3
?
(a) 1-step
simple
(b) 1-step
complex
(c) 2-steps
simple
(d) 2-steps
complex
Fig. 1.
Examples of materials
As shown in Figure 2, a trial of the experiment starts with a red star shown
for 2 seconds as warning (the stimulus is visually shown on a black screen),
the participants solve the puzzle in the following period of 20 seconds in maxi-
mum. When participants find the answer of '?', they are asked to press a button
immediately and speak out the answer in a 2 seconds period. Participants are
encouraged to finish the problem as correctly and quickly as possible. After that,
the correct answer is provided in the screen for 2 seconds as a feedback. Then
there is a 10 seconds of inter-trial interval (ITI; a white cross shown on the
screen) and the participants are asked to take rest in this period.
There were 5 sessions each with 48 or more trials and each session involved 4
types of tasks randomly selected with equal probability.
1
2
3
1
2
3
4
?
4
?
2
*
+
3
3
2s
2s
20s
2s
10s
Time
Fig. 2.
The protocol of a scan trial
