Comparative Analysis of Human Adaptation to the Growth of Visual Information in the Problems of Recognition of Formal Symbols and Meaningful Images

Abstract

We describe the engineering-psychological experiment, continuing the study of the ways of human adaptation to increasing complexity of logical problems with the method of presentation of the series of tasks of increasing complexity. Tasks require calculations in associative or nonassociative system of operations. By the nature of the change in the time of solving the problem, depending on the number of necessary operations, it can be concluded that a purely sequential method of solving problems or connecting additional brain resources to the solution in parallel. In a previously published experimental work, a person in the process of solving an associative problem recognized color pictures with meaningful images. In the new study, a similar problem is solved for abstract monochrome geometric shapes. The analysis of the result showed that for the second case the probability of the test subject’s transition to a parallel method of processing visual information is significantly reduced. As a control series of problems (to separate parallel work from the acceleration of the sequential algorithm), as in the previous experiment, a non-associative comparison problem in cyclic arithmetic, presented in the visual form of the game “stone, scissors, paper” is used.