Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Subliminal information has been suggested to facilitate insight problem solving. The present study examinedwhether subliminal hints may influence not only retention of the goals but also planning of sequential steps required to solve thenine-dot problem. Using continuous flash suppression, participants were subliminally presented with either an image depictingthe entire solution of the problem, the three steps to solve the problem in a sequential order, or an image of the nine dots thatdoes not involve solution of the problem. Participants presented with the entire solution of the problem tended to show bettersolution performance and greater relaxation of constraints than those in the latter two conditions, whose performance failedto significantly differ from each other. These results indicate that subliminal information may be stored as a global and staticvisuo-spatial representation to influence solution but may not involve planning of each step to achieve insight problem solving.