Comparative analysis of human adaptation to the growth of visual information in the tasks of recognizing formal symbols and meaningful images

We describe an engineering-psychological experiment that continues the study of ways to adapt a person to the increasing complexity of logical problems by presenting a series of problems of increasing complexity, which is determined by the volume of initial data. Tasks require calculations in an associative or non-associative system of operations. By the nature of the change in the time of solving the problem, depending on the number of necessary operations, we can conclude that a purely sequential method of solving problems or connecting additional brain resources to the solution in parallel mode. In a previously published experimental work, a person in the process of solving an associative problem recognized color images with meaningful images. In the new study, a similar problem is solved for abstract monochrome geometric shapes. Analysis of the result showed that for the second case, the probability of the subject switching to a parallel method of processing visual information is significantly reduced. The research method is based on presenting a person with two types of tasks. One type of problem contains associative calculations and allows a parallel solution algorithm. Another type of problem is the control one, which contains problems in which calculations are not associative and parallel algorithms are ineffective. The task of recognizing and searching for a given object is associative. A parallel strategy significantly speeds up the solution with relatively small additional resources. As a control series of problems (to separate parallel work from the acceleration of a sequential algorithm), we use, as in the previous experiment, a non-associative comparison problem in cyclic arithmetic, presented in the visual form of the game “rock, paper, scissors”. In this problem, the parallel algorithm requires a large number of processors with a small efficiency coefficient. Therefore, the transition of a person to a parallel algorithm for solving this problem is almost impossible, and the acceleration of processing input information is possible only by increasing the speed. Comparing the dependence of the solution time on the volume of source data for two types of problems allows us to identify four types of strategies for adapting to the increasing complexity of the problem: uniform sequential, accelerated sequential, parallel computing (where possible), or undefined (for this method) strategy. The Reducing of the number of subjects, who switch to a parallel strategy when encoding input information with formal images, shows the effectiveness of codes that cause subject associations. They increase the speed of human perception and processing of information. The article contains a preliminary mathematical model that explains this phenomenon. It is based on the appearance of a second set of initial data, which occurs in a person as a result of recognizing the depicted objects.