Psychonomic Bulletin Review 2007 14 4 663 668 Moving eyes and moving thought On the spatial compatibility between eye movements and cognition Laura E Thomas and Alejandro Lleras University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Urbana Illinois Grant and Spivey 2003 proposed that eye movement trajectories can influence spatial reasoning by way of an implicit eye movement to cognition link We tested this proposal and investigated the nature of this link by continuously monitoring eye movements and asking participants to perform a problem solving task under free viewing conditions while occasionally guiding their eye movements via an unrelated tracking task either in a pattern related to the problem s solution or in unrelated patterns Although participants reported that they were not aware of any relationship between the tracking task and the problem those who moved their eyes in a pattern related to the problem s solution were the most successful problem solvers Our results support the existence of an implicit compatibility between spatial cognition and the eye movement patterns that people use to examine a scene For over 30 years researchers have used eyetracking techniques to gain insight into cognitive processing The examination of eye fixations and eye movements during diagram based problem solving has given us a better understanding of problem solving strategies in a wide variety of tasks such as mental rotation insight problem solving and inference making see e g Just Carpenter 1985 Knoblich Ohlsson Raney 2001 Lenhart 1983 Although researchers have long investigated how cognitive processes influence eye movements only recently have they begun to look into the reciprocal relationship and ask how eye movements might influence cognitive processes A recent study by Grant and Spivey 2003 began to address the question of whether eye movements can direct cognitive processing during a problem solving task using a classic insight problem1 Karl Duncker s 1945 radiation problem Figure 1A presents a diagram of this problem In their study Grant and Spivey showed participants a similar diagram and gave them the following instructions diagram and instructions adapted by Grant Spivey 2003 from Duncker 1945 Given a human being with an inoperable stomach tumor and lasers which destroy organic tissue at sufficient intensity how can one cure the person with these lasers and at the same time avoid harming the healthy tissue that surrounds the tumor The correct solution to this problem entails firing multiple low intensity lasers from different locations around the tumor so that they converge at the tumor Although each individual laser is too weak to damage the healthy tissue surrounding the tumor the combined intensity of multiple lasers that meet at the tumor is enough to destroy it In this problem the relevant areas are the inner black oval representing the tumor the outer black oval representing the skin and the healthy tissue it encompasses and the white area beyond the skin representing the outside area from which the multiple lasers must fire In their first experiment Grant and Spivey 2003 recorded the eye movements of participants attempting to solve the radiation problem They found that participants who successfully solved the problem within 10 min without hints spent more time looking at the skin area than did participants unable to solve the problem without hints On the basis of this finding Grant and Spivey concluded that the skin area was critical for inferring the problem s solution In a second experiment in which eye movements were not recorded they attempted to direct a group of participants attention to this critical area by presenting them with a problem diagram in which the skin pulsed Participants who viewed a skin pulsing diagram had a higher rate of problem solving success than did those who viewed a static diagram or those who viewed a diagram in which a noncritical area the tumor pulsed What was special about the skin area in Grant and Spivey s 2003 experiments The researchers suggested that increasing the time that participants spent viewing the skin area also increased triangular in and out eye movement patterns in which participants looked to the outside area moved their eyes across the skin and into the tumor area and then moved back out again to another outside area This in and out pattern of eye movements actually L E Thomas lethomas cyrus psych uiuc edu 663 Copyright 2007 Psychonomic Society Inc 664 Thomas and Lleras A Outside Tumor Healthy Tissue Skin B C 1 3 1 2 4 6 8 7 2 5 8 5 D 4 3 E 1 3 5 7 2 4 6 8 1 8 Figure 1 Diagram of Duncker s 1945 radiation problem Panel B shows the letter digit sequence locations for the embodied solution group panel C shows the sequence for the areas of interest group panel D shows the sequence for the repeated skincrossing group and panel E shows the sequence for the tumor fixation group embodies the solution to the radiation problem the eyes draw a path that reflects multiple lasers converging from different outer areas at the tumor Grant and Spivey found that successful problem solvers in their first experiment made significantly more skin crossing in and out saccades than did unsuccessful problem solvers They suggested that these skin crossing saccades acted as an embodied physical mechanism that initiated a perceptual simulation Barsalou 1999 of multiple lasers fired from different points outside the diagram They concluded that eye movements guided cognitive processing in the radiation problem task these results provide an example of embodied cognition e g Wilson 2002 Grant and Spivey s 2003 work suggests that cognitive processing and eye movement patterns are linked It also raises interesting questions about the nature of the relationship between eye movements and problem solving By devising a task that manipulated participants eye movements as they viewed a problem diagram we investigated the hypothesis that eye movements can act as an embodied mechanism that guides cognitive processing Whereas Grant and Spivey found that successful problem solvers tended to move their eyes in a pattern that embodied the problem s solution we investigated whether we could turn participants into successful problem solvers by forcing them to move their eyes in a pattern that embodied the problem s solution To do so we occasionally guided the eye movements of participants with a tracking task while they attempted to solve Duncker s 1945 radiation problem
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