Easy Puzzles Research Articles

Two faces of grit–perseverance: Is it always good to exert grit?

ABSTRACT The present study examined the benefits and costs of grit–perseverance by manipulating the solvability of Sudoku puzzles. Grit–perseverance is one of the two factors of grit, which we propose can be measured in terms of time spent on a challenging problem. We examined the effect of grit–perseverance on the performance of the final puzzle administered after the practice set. We hypothesised that (i) exerting grit–perseverance when solving a difficult puzzle would improve participants’ ability to solve the final difficult puzzle due to practice, while (ii) sticking to an unsolvable puzzle would result in a lower performance on the final easy puzzle. The results supported our hypotheses. While grit exertion had a positive influence on solving a difficult problem, it had a negative influence when participants encountered an unsolvable problem. These results suggest that grit is not always beneficial and can hinder enhancing problem-solving skills.

To Help or To Harm? Assessing the Impact of Envy on Prosocial and Antisocial Behaviors.

Two studies examined how envy influences prosocial and antisocial behavior. In Experiment 1, participants in an envious state (relative to a neutral state) were less helpful: They picked up fewer dropped pencils in their immediate vicinity. We expanded upon these findings by examining how envy affected both helping and harming behavior in a competitive scenario. In Experiment 2, individuals in envious or neutral states assigned puzzle tasks to another student in a prisoner's dilemma style scenario. Prosocial and antisocial behaviors were assessed via the difficulty of the assigned puzzles (easy puzzles were considered helpful and difficult puzzles were harmful). We hypothesized that experiencing envy would result in greater motive to harm as well as greater likelihood of engaging in harmful behavior. The hypothesis was supported, suggesting that envy has detrimental ramifications that go beyond the individual and extend to interpersonal relationships.

Using Wordscapes Game as a Tool to Develop EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Repertoire

The most vital part of our lives nowadays is technology. It has changed our lives in many ways. It makes life well-situated for us. At the present time, young people are more expected to be seen playing video games. Some assume that movies, TV, and video games are a bad influence on kids, and they hold responsible on these media for causing different problems. Supposed negative effects such as addiction, increased aggression, and various health consequences such as obesity and repetitive strain injuries tend to get far more media coverage than the positives. While there are some negatives on playing video games, there’s no denying that they stop us from getting outside. There are also some benefits. Surprisingly, playing video games can help our physical, mental, and emotional health. A growing number of researchers believed that if used in the right way, video and computer games have the potential to inspire learning. And they can help players improve organization and visual skills.
 Thus, when learning is channeled into an enjoyable game, they are very often willing to invest considerable time and effort in playing it. Moreover, in view of diverse learning styles and preferences the students display, benefits from games seem to cater for everyone as learners find playing activities much richer language studying work than doing other kinds of practice. If games are properly designed, they may become an excellent and essential part of a learners’ learning programme. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that games like any other activity or tool can be overused when exploited too much so that the motivating element disappears rapidly.
 
 ABSTRACT
 Playing games such as puzzle games, word search, crosswords, mix and matching, scrabble, etc. are brain motivating problems that test one’s creativity. These games increase brain power which makes them a proper choice for use in educational purposes besides just providing mere entertainment. They educate, improve your intelligence proportion, improve your cognitive ability, improve your concentration, develop motor skills, improve your problem solving skills, improve productivity and can improve your social skills.
 The most preferred game at the moment is the game developed by People Fun! named “WordScapes”. The game starts with easy puzzles and becomes challenging. There are over 800 puzzles in this game which is really astonishing. Despite the fact that, the developers call it up-to-the-minute word game, it’s quite regular word games. In addition, not too much only one of its kind like Alpha Swipe or Under a Spell. But, it’s really pleasurable and one of the most addicting word puzzle game.
 In addition to the distraction significance of games, they have great didactic latent. Games exclusively intended to deal with a specific problem such as developing learners’ vocabulary repertoire or teach a specific skill have been very successful, in particular because they are motivating, engaging, interactive, and provide rewards and strengthening to improve.

Perseverance in solving Sudoku: role of grit and cognitive flexibility in problem solving

ABSTRACTProblem solving is a higher order cognitive capacity with implications for everyday functioning. Although Grit predicts academic outcomes, the relation between facets of Grit, Consistency and Perseverance, and problem solving remain unknown. We report the results of two studies conducted to examine the impact of facets of grit on problem solving within the context of solving Sudoku puzzles. In Study 1, Grit-Perseverance predicted performance on the hard versus easy puzzle. In Study 2, we increased the difficulty level of the puzzles and assessed cognitive flexibility using the Wisconsin Card Sort Test. Grit-Perseverance was associated with effort on both the hard and very hard puzzles. Further, mediation analyses revealed that Grit-Perseverance indirectly predicted increased effort on the very hard puzzle through decreased cognitive flexibility. Overall our results demonstrate that Grit-Perseverance, not Consistency, impacts problem solving and highly gritty individuals may be most successful in solving challenging problems that are moderately constrained.

No easy puzzles: Hardness results for jigsaw puzzles

We show that solving (bounded-degree) jigsaw puzzles requires Θ(n2) edge matching comparisons both in the worst case and in expectation, making all jigsaw puzzles as hard to solve as the trivial upper bound. This result applies to bounded-degree puzzles of all shapes, whether pictorial or apictorial. For non-bounded degree puzzles, we show that Ω(nlog⁡n) is a tight bound.

Parenting and independent problem-solving in preschool children with food allergy.

To examine autonomy-promoting parenting and independent problem-solving in children with food allergy. 66 children with food allergy, aged 3-6 years, and 67 age-matched healthy peers and their mothers were videotaped while completing easy and difficult puzzles. Coders recorded time to puzzle completion, children's direct and indirect requests for help, and maternal help-giving behaviors. Compared with healthy peers, younger (3- to 4-year-old) children with food allergy made more indirect requests for help during the easy puzzle, and their mothers were more likely to provide unnecessary help (i.e., explain where to place a puzzle piece). Differences were not found for older children. The results suggest that highly involved parenting practices that are medically necessary to manage food allergy may spill over into settings where high levels of involvement are not needed, and that young children with food allergy may be at increased risk for difficulties in autonomy development.

The Chaos Within Sudoku

The mathematical structure of Sudoku puzzles is akin to hard constraint satisfaction problems lying at the basis of many applications, including protein folding and the ground-state problem of glassy spin systems. Via an exact mapping of Sudoku into a deterministic, continuous-time dynamical system, here we show that the difficulty of Sudoku translates into transient chaotic behavior exhibited by this system. We also show that the escape rate κ, an invariant of transient chaos, provides a scalar measure of the puzzle's hardness that correlates well with human difficulty ratings. Accordingly, η = −log10 κ can be used to define a “Richter”-type scale for puzzle hardness, with easy puzzles having 0 < η ≤ 1, medium ones 1 < η ≤ 2, hard with 2 < η ≤ 3 and ultra-hard with η > 3. To our best knowledge, there are no known puzzles with η > 4.

Collaborative Problem Solving in Five‐Year‐Old Children: Evidence of social facilitation and social loafing

Children’s problem solving while working by themselves or with a partner was investigated to explore whether young children are susceptible to social facilitation and social loafing. Five‐year‐olds were asked to complete easy or hard puzzles, either alone or with a partner. Half of the children were given instructions indicating that their performance would be evaluated and the other half were not. Children showed social facilitation, in that they performed better with a partner than when working alone under evaluation conditions, with the easy puzzle. Children also showed social loafing, in that performance with a partner was poorer when working under no evaluation than evaluation conditions, with the easy puzzle. Performance with the hard puzzle did not differ whether children worked alone or with a partner, but children working on the hard puzzle under no evaluation conditions performed better than those working under evaluation conditions. The findings suggest that evaluation affects children’s performance in group settings in different ways depending on task difficulty.

"Aha!" effects in a guessing riddle task: an event-related potential study.

Insight problem solving has been the topic of much investigation. It is believed widely that insight critically contains the process of breaking one's mental set. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research on puzzle solving showed that insight was associated with activities in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and other areas (Luo and Niki [2003]: Hippocampus 13:274-281). We proposed ACC might mediate processes of breaking one's mental set, given its well-known role in cognitive conflict. In the present research, high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to examine the electrophysiologic correlates of insight problem solving. One hundred twenty interesting Chinese riddles (half difficult and half easy) were adopted as materials. For each trial, subjects were either given an easy puzzle followed by a keyword that was consistent with the subject's initial thinking ("No-aha answer"), or a difficult puzzle followed by a keyword that was consistent with an unusual interpretation, so that it broke the subject's initial mental set ("Aha answer"). Results from 14 subjects showed that Aha answers elicited a more negative ERP deflection than did No-aha answers in the time window from 250-500 msec after onset of the answer. The ERP difference wave (Aha minus No-aha answer) showed the maximum amplitude over the central site (Cz) with a peak latency of 380 msec (N380). Voltage and current density maps of the difference wave showed strong activity and current density in the frontocentral region. Dipole analysis localized the generator of the N380 in the ACC. N380 therefore probably reflects an "Aha!" effect, and the ACC generator may be involved in the breaking of mental set.

幼児の課題選択に及ぼす成功価情報の効果

The purpose of this study was to investigate effects of information concerning the value of being successful in given tasks on 68 preschool children's (38 boys and 30 girls) choice of the tasks. Jigsaw puzzles with three levels of difficulty were used as the tasks for children to choose from. Half of the five-year old children were given the information concerning the value of success in each task difficulty level. Under the no-information condition, children tended to choose the easy puzzle, while those under the information condition tended to choose the more difficult one. It was concluded that value-of-success information changed children's choice from an easy to a more difficult task. Implications of the results were discussed

Three easy puzzles based on the Diels-Alder reaction

This paper recasts some classic systems so that they can be done at room temperature on a small scale in a large lab course without sophisticated instrumentation. Furthermore, they start the student using experimental results to solve mechanistic problems.

The effects of social reinforcement and task difficulty level on the pleasure derived by normal and retarded children from cognitive challenge and mastery

In order to examine several factors influencing the pleasure derived from mastery, 32 normal first-grade children (mean MA = 7.7) and 32 MA-matched familial mentally retarded children were given puzzles representing four difficulty levels. Half of the children were socially reinforced for their successes and half performed in an experimenter-absent condition. There was more smiling among normal than retarded children, in the social reinforcement than in the experimenter-absent condition, and among girls than boys. The condition effect was greater for girls than boys. In the experimenter-absent condition, normal children displayed more pleasure on the difficult than on the easy puzzles, whereas the trend was just the reverse for the retarded children. Large within-sex differences were found for normal girls only, revealing that one subgroup derived more pleasure from the more difficult puzzles whereas another subgroup enjoyed the easier puzzles more. The findings were discussed in terms of the author's refinement of White's model of effectance motivation.

Manipulatory responsiveness in protein-malnourished monkeys

Two groups of rhesus monkeys were placed on diets containing either 3% or 25% protein at 210 days of age and tested consecutively on two puzzle manipulation tasks varying in difficulty. Malnourished Ss were able to learn to solve the puzzles in the absence of food rewards but showed significantly lower final performance levels on the easier puzzles than did controls. The more complex puzzles were learned with equal difficulty by the high- and low-protein groups. Manipulatory responsiveness in this study was interpreted to be partially influenced by secondary diseases associated with protein-calorie malnutrition.