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Sketchpad Series

Neural Differences in Categorization Learning Can Predict Fixation to Examples During Problem Solving

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Evangelia G. Chrysikou¹ (lilachrysikou@gmail.com), Alexandra E. Kelly¹, Dong Ho Kim², Julie Milovanovich³, John Gero³; ¹Drexel University, ²Northwestern University, ³University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Design fixation refers to the tendency to reproduce elements of examples during problem solving, even when they represent clearly erroneous or inappropriate solutions. Although mechanical engineers frequently show evidence of design fixation, product designers are less susceptible to fixation effects during design problem solving. We hypothesize that—beyond disciplinary differences—individual differences in how participants approach learning tasks may partially underlie these effects: Abstraction learners tend to extract generalizable rules and apply them to new situations thus resisting fixation, whereas exemplar learners tend to memorize specific examples and reproduce them during learning thus increasing their susceptibility to fixation. In this study our goal is to provide behavioral and neural evidence of the two different learning profiles, and relate them to behavioral evidence of design fixation. Mechanical engineering and product design students are administered behavioral learning and design problem solving tasks. They are also asked to complete a category learning task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Structural and resting state fMRI measures are also collected during the imaging session. Our preliminary analysis examines neural differences in executive control and basal ganglia regions during the categorization learning task between participants who are classified as either abstraction or exemplar learners based on their behavioral performance on the learning task outside of the scanner. We also examine whether these neural differences predict participants’ tendency to fixate to pictorial examples during problem solving. We discuss a neurocognitive framework for fixation to pictorial examples and its implications for theories of learning and creative problem solving.

Topic Area: THINKING: Problem solving