Visual Thinking Research

 In this puzzle you are suppose to count how many triangles there are in the picture of the cat.  My girlfriend and I both did the puzzle for 5 minutes.  This first picture is of the puzzle I did.  I used pattern seeking and finding to figure out how many triangles there were.  I started at the top of the head counting triangles and moved down through the body to the tail.  In the end I counted 19 triangles, but there was actually 20.  I messed up on the middle part of the tail.  It is broken up in to 4 separate triangles.  I thought there was a pattern with the first part of the tail with a big triangle and a small triangle.  But there are actually two big triangles in the middle section.

 This puzzle is the one my girlfriend did.  She also used pattern seeking and finding to figure out how many triangles there were.  She also started at the top and moved down and ended at the tail.  We were sitting on opposite sides of the room, so it is interesting that we had a similar approach to the puzzle.  She also got 19 instead of 20 triangles.  She made the same mistake I did with the middle section of the cat’s tail.  That is also interesting that we both made the same mistake.

In this puzzle you are suppose to figure out with spiral consists of a single piece of rope and which has two separate pieces.  For this puzzle you are not suppose to write on it while solving, which my girlfriend and I did not, but I wrote on it after to illustrate how we both tried to solve it.  This first picture is of the puzzle I did.  On the left spiral I focused on the blue lines and followed both of them around until I got to the middle and they separated.  Because the separated in the middle I figured this was the spiral with a single piece of rope.  On the right spiral I followed the blue lines again.  When I got to the center the blue lines ended together.  Because this happened I knew this was the spiral with two pieces of rope.

This puzzle is the one my girlfriend did, and I think she had a better approach then me.  Instead of following the blue lines she followed the white space inside the blue lines.  On the left spiral she followed the white space and ended up on the other end of the spiral.  That is how she knew it was one piece of rope.  On the right spiral she followed the white space again and ended up in the middle.  That is how she figured out that spiral was made of two pieces of rope.