"Try turning it upside-down!" Contraries facilitate insight in problem solving

Contraries has been shown to be relevant to many cognitive abilities, such as spatial perception (e.g. Bianchi, Savardi, & Kubovy, 2011), language (e.g. Jones et al., 2012), understanding humor (e.g. Colston & O'Brien, 2002; Canestrari & Bianchi, 2013) hypothesis testing (e.g. Gale & Ball, 2012), relational reasoning (e.g. Alexander, 2012), creativity and divergent thinking (e.g. Duncker, 1945; Rothenberg, 1996). We will add to this list with recent evidence that thinking in terms of contraries support the thought processes of small groups of people whose task is to solve visuo-spatial insight problems. They were specifically told that systematically transforming the spatial features of each problem into their contraries would help them to find the correct solution. The participants either took part in a training program including explanations of the strategy to follow or they were given hints which acted as a kind of ‘priming’ (Branchini et al., 2015, 2016, in preparation). The results varied in these two conditions but in general the suggestion to use contraries turned out to be beneficial in terms of success rates and it impacted on the behavior of the groups judging from the drawings they did and their dialogues. Possible explanations are discussed as to how this might have impacted on the process of representational change necessary to overcome an impasse (Knoblich et al., 2001; Öllinger et al., 2008). We will also relate these findings to the debate on the role of conscious and unconscious processes in non-routine problems (e.g. Gilhooly et al., 2015).