The Mechanisms Of Forming And Breaking Mental Set With Regularity Effect For Pictophonetic Characters

Mental set was the tendency to solve certain problems in a fixed way based on previous solutions to similar problems. In the late19th century early20th century, lots of professors had recognized the importance of mental set in daily life, and took it as the core concept to explain all of the psychological phenomenon. After Luchins’ classic water-jar paradigm, the methods of mental set were similar or just modified based on it. But we can’t know directly whether the subjects broke mental set or not through the results, it can’t be used to explore the electrophysiological mechanisms, either. Previous perspectives about the brain mechanism of breaking mental set were constraint relaxation and chunk decomposition in insight problems. However, the mechanism of mental set was related to knowledge and experiences in long-term memory, which was different from the skills learned in laboratory and stored in short-term memory.The present research adopted regularity effect of pictophonetic characters through3experiments to study mental set forming and breaking effects with phonogram.Exp1used some regular consistent Chinese characters to induce mental set with same radical. That’s to say, the pronunciation of word which combined the same radical with phonetic was same as phonogram. The results of Expl indicated react times of regular word in guiding condition was faster than base-line condition. And accuracy was higher than base-line condition. It showed that pictophonetic characters naming paradigm can induce mental set in laboratory.Exp2matched materials basing on Expl, and showed that mental set forming and breaking effects with inconsistent radicals were both significant. That’s to say, taking contrast with base-line condition, mental set inducing condition’s react time was longer and accuracy was lower.Exp3compared mental set inducing or breaking condition with base-line condition with event-related potentials to explore mental set effect. The results implicated that regular words of mental set inducing condition elicited a more positive ERP deflection (P250-400) than did base-line condition between250and400ms after onset of the "du" stimuli. The P250-400was possibly involved in the mental set facilitating effect and linked to memory updating, encoding or retrieval. Furthermore, irregular of mental set inducing condition elicited a less negative ERP deflection (N400-800) than did base-line condition between400and800ms. The N400-800might reflect inhibiting mental set.