Exercise #4: Visual Thinking Research

For the visual thinking research, I chose to do my visual puzzles with my mom. At the end of each puzzle, we compared our results and each time they were different. The first puzzle was a cat made of triangles and the goal was to find how many triangles were in the image. My answer was 20, but my mom's answer was 13. The right answer was 20 triangles. When we compared strategies, it seemed as though my mom used "matching" and "categorizing" because she tended to see which triangles looked the same. She also said she was trying to complete the puzzle quick. Which in this case, she was using "perceptual speed" in the puzzle because she was quickly matching any obvious triangles she saw. On the other hand, I used the "finding" and "matching" technique. I took the "long way," I took my time to find every triangle I possible could.

The second visual puzzle we did was dots. With the dots, the viewer is suppose to figure out how many squares can be found by connecting the dots. My answer for this puzzle was 17, but my mom's answer was 19. The actual answer for this puzzle was 21. So we both did not find all the squares in the puzzle, but we did get close to the answer. When we compared strategies, it seems that both my mom and I used the "pattern completion" and "visual memory." We both visually completed the squares that weren't really there. From our visual memory, we tried to complete the puzzle but remembering the different sizes and angles that squares can be seen in.