Testing the Independence of Representational Change Theory Processes

One theory about the way insight problems are solved, Representational Change Theory (RCT; Knoblich et al., 1999), proposes two processes are responsible for changing an initial incorrect representation into one that allows for a solution to be found. These two processes, constraint relaxation and chunk decomposition, are assumed to operate independently of one another (Öllinger et al., 2008). To test this assumption, the present study used matchstick arithmetic problems to manipulate these processes independently using different instructions. Overall, there was partial support that the processes of constraint relaxation and chunk decomposition are independent. The chunk decomposition instructions only improved performance on problems that required chunk decomposition, but the constraint relaxation instruction did not improve performance on either problem type. This is likely due to the constraint relaxation instruction being weaker than the chunk decomposition instruction, which meant that the independence assumption could not be fully tested in this study.