HYPOTHESIS Mind puzzle games has no significant effect to nonverbal reasoning ability of college students.
CONTROL VARIABLE: Educational Attainment
RANDOM VARIABLE: Gender and Age
INDEPENDENT VARIABLE: Mind Puzzle Games
DEPENDENT VARIABLE: Nonverbal Reasoning Ability
BACKGROUND OF THE TOPIC Nonverbal tasks involve skills such as: ability to recognize visual sequences and remember them, understanding the meaning of visual information and recognizing relationships between visual concepts, performing visual analogies; and recognition of causal relationships in pictured situations. (learningdisabilities.about.com) A study published in Brain and Cognition (Volume 46, 2001, pp. 95-179) showed that the elderly performed significantly poorer on the Towers of Hanoi puzzle than younger subjects. Carroll’s (1993) analyses of the fluid reasoning factor show that it, in turn, is defined by three reasoning abilities: (a) sequential reasoning (verbal, logical, or deductive reasoning); (b) quantitative reasoning (inductive or deductive reasoning with quantitative concepts); and (c) inductive reasoning (typically measured with figural tasks). The psychologists Sternberg and Davidson argued, as far back as 1982 (Psychology Today, Volume 16, pp. 37-44), that solving puzzles entails the ability to compare hidden information in a puzzle with information already in memory, and, more importantly, the ability to combine the information to form novel information and ideas. The thinking involved in solving puzzles can thus be characterized as a blend of imaginative association and memory. It is this blend that leads us to literally see the pattern or twist that a puzzle conceals. The Green and Gendelman experiments (2003) randomly assigned children to treatment and control conditions. Both experimental groups were presented with