Abstract
Insight is sudden comprehension of the new situation. For example, when we see an ambiguous image, a sudden insight occurs to us before we comprehend the image. This study aims to investigate the implicit preparation for the insight. Here, we represented the hidden image of the lattice-shaped dots movie, which was created by the dots methods (Moca et al., 2011) from the original image to control the stimulus difficulty and measured pupil diameter while participants were asked to respond whether they recognized the object in the movie. Thus, we hypothesized that the pupil dilation should be reflected by the implicit processing of the insight to the hidden image. In the Exp.1, participants were instructed to respond when they came up to mind what the object is. The results showed that the averaged pupil dilation before the insight was larger in the recognition trials than in the no-recognition ones. This implies that the pupil dilation reflected the spontaneous processing to reach the insight, not the recognition state. Therefore we demonstrated that the pupil dilation before the insight by manipulating the presentation time (1.5s vs. 6s) (Exp.2). The results of pupil dilation were significantly similar to those in the Exp.1. Crucially, despite the fact that participants could not comprehend in short presentation condition (1.5s), the pupil was dilated depending on the subsequent insight in long presentation condition. Moreover, the pupillary response can not be explained by the cognitive effort such as the motivation for solving the problem from self-confidence response in their comprehension. These suggested that the pupil dilation affected by the LC-NE system activity reflected the integration of the pre-processing between the visual information and the memory retrieval.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017