Validation of Italian rebus puzzles and compound remote associate problems

Abstract

Rebus puzzles and compound remote associate problems have been successfully used to study problem solving. These problems are physically compact, often can be solved within short time limits, and have unambiguous solutions, and English versions have been normed for solving rates and levels of difficulty. Many studies on problem solving with sudden insight have taken advantage of these features in paradigms that require many quick solutions (e.g., solution priming, visual hemifield presentations, electroencephalography, fMRI, and eyetracking). In order to promote this vein of research in Italy, as well, we created and tested Italian versions of both of these tests. The data collected across three studies yielded a pool of 88 rebus puzzles and 122 compound remote associate problems within a moderate range of difficulty. This article provides both sets of problems with their normative data, for use in future research.

Insight solutions are correct more often than analytic solutions

“…By including widely used sets of problems such as the CRAs and anagrams in this study, we were able to make comparisons to tasks like rebus puzzles and the visual aha problems that have been used to study insight problem solving only recently (Ludmer, Dudai, & Rubin, 2011; MacGregor & Cunningham, 2008; Salvi, Costantini, et al, 2015). Though further research should continue to compare performance for different types of problems, we believe that the consistency of the present results (obtained with a single experimental protocol) suggests that a core set of solving strategies (insight and analytic) and strategy-judgment processes operate across the types of problems.…”

“…Eighty-eight Italian rebus puzzles (Salvi, Costantini, Bricolo, Perugini, & Beeman, 2015; see Figure 1(C)) were administered to participants. Each participant received a block of 32 balanced trials.…”

“…To solve each rebus puzzle, participants had to combine verbal and visual clues to make a common phrase, such as: LUNA – solution: luna calante , “decreasing/waning moon”; Ciclo, Ciclo, Ciclo (i.e., Cycle, Cycle, Cycle) – solution: triciclo, “tricycle”; T+U+T+T+O – solution: tutto sommato , “all summate”, a common Italian phrase which could be translated as “all things considered”. Rebus puzzles have been demonstrated to be a valid source of insight problems (MacGregor & Cunningham, 2008) which, like CRAs (Experiment 1) and anagrams (Experiment 2), can be solved either with insight or analytically (Salvi, Costantini, et al, 2015). The Inquisit (2012) software package was used for stimulus presentation, randomisation and response recording.…”

A Visual Remote Associates Test and Its Validation

“…A good answer to this particular query is ICE. The Remote Associates Test has been widely used in the literature (Dorfman et al, 1996;Ansburg, 2000;Ansburg and Hill, 2003;Ward et al, 2008;Cai et al, 2009;Cunningham et al, 2009). Stimuli for this test exist not just in English (Bowden and Jung-Beeman, 2003;, but also German (Landmann et al, 2014), Chinese (Shen et al, 2016;Wu and Chen, 2017), Italian (Salvi et al, 2016), Romanian (Olteţeanu et al, 2019b), etc. An approach toward generating functional RAT queries has also been proposed (Olteţeanu et al, 2019a), enhancing the repository of available RAT queries.…”

Validation of the Italian Remote Associate Test

“…For instance, same, tennis, head can be associated with the word match by creating the compound word match‐head, by semantic association (i.e., tennis match ) and because of synonymy (i.e., same = match ). Afterward, the CRA, a measure similar to the RAT, was developed (Bowden & Jung‐Beeman, ; see Salvi, Costantini, Bricolo, Perugini, & Beeman, for the Italian version), where the solution word always forms a compound word or a common two‐word phrase with each problem word (e.g., in the problem crab, pine, sauce , the solution apple forms the compounds crabapple , pineapple , and apple sauce ). Thus, although the CRA is based upon a more consistent rule, the RAT is based upon a more flexible rule leading to a broader semantic search that involves association and synonymy in addition to word matching.…”