Visual Thinking Research

For my visual research I picked two games to play with my mom off of http://www.puzzles.com/PuzzlePlayground/Visual.htm

The first game we played was The Cat.  In this game we simply had to count up all the triangles in the picture of the cat.  

My strategy was to simply count all the obvious triangles starting with the most complicated area of the cat, the tail, and them moving to simpler areas like the body.  I then went back over the more complicated areas and started counting off triangels made by combining more than one triangle.  

My mom's strategy (seen on the right hand side) involved starting at the top of the cat and working her way down to the tail.  She did not realize at first that multiple triangles could be combined to form bigger triangles but once she figured that out, she was only able to find the ones in the tail. 

 We both missed the 4 extra ones that made up the eyes.  Since we were both looking for triangles, we were both using pattern seeking.  It was easy to find the triangles with obvious contours but building up triangles from shapes with separate contours like in the tail and eyes was a bit more difficult.  

The second game we played was called Five Routs in which we had to get the little men to their respective houses without any of their paths crossing. 

I quickly realized this game was much harder than it looked.  At first it though I would move each man one square at a time so that i would be able to foresee when their paths would cross.  This strategy did not work out because it was impossible to get them anywhere without a fully formed plan.  I decided to work with one man at a time and just try not to cross between other men and their houses.  This strategy only worked for 4 out of 5 of the men.  I simply could not figure out how to get person A to his house.

My mom's approach (seen on the right) was to use as few tiles as possible while not crossing between other men and their houses.  It took her a couple attempts to get 4 our of 5 of the men to their houses.  

While trying to figure out the proper paths for the men to take, we both utalized visual reasoning.  Visual logic told us that direct paths to the houses would cause the routs to cross so we therefore had to figure out which squares would get one man to his house while not cutting off another man from getting to his house.