Inhibitory Control And Mathematical Problems Solving: The Perspective Of Expertise

Mathematical problem solving is an important mathematical literacy.However,many students find it difficult to solve problems.The Inhibitory Control Model claims that the competition exists between heuristic and analytical systems when problems are solved.When the heuristic system does not match the problem situation,it will interfere with the problem solving,so it is necessary to inhibit the misleading heuristics.Individuals still make errors in problems solving even if they have mastered relevant knowledge and concepts,which is due to the failure of inhibition.Previous studies have shown that children,adolescents,and even adults need to inhibit in conflict mathematical problem and support the Inhibitory Control Model.However,few studies have examined whether experts need inhibitory control when solving mathematical problems.In present study,a negative priming paradigm is adopted to examine whether different types of experts need inhibitory control in various types of mathematical problem solving tasks.Primary school mathematics teachers,mathematics teacher majors,and non-major mathematics students are chosen as subjects.Four different mathematics tasks were designed to examine whether experts need the inhibitory control in solving mathematical problems.Experiment 1 examines whether expert and non-expert participants need to inhibit in fraction comparison tasks.Experiment 2 examines whether expert and non-expert participants need to inhibit in the perimeter comparison task.Experiment 3 and 4 examine whether expert participants and non-expert participants need inhibitory control when solving additive problems.The results show that only the non-major mathematics students have negative priming effect in fraction comparison tasks;only the mathematics teacher majors have negative priming effect in the perimeter comparison task;In the text addition application,all three groups of subjects appear negative priming effect;In the picture reasoning task,there was no negative priming effect in all three subjects.The findings are as follows:First,whether experts need inhibitory control in the solving of mathematical problems is related to the types of tasks.Experts in complex tasks need to inhibit misleading strategies like ordinary adults.In simple tasks,experts do not need inhibitory control to solve the problem correctly.Second,there is no significant difference in the inhibitory control efficiency between experts and other adults.