Navigating the Garden Path: Evidence for Restructuring as a Shared Process

Resolving misrepresentations is key when faced with ambiguous information. For example, problem-solvers may misrepresent the constraints of a problem, while readers may misrepresent parts of a sentence. This work investigates how a shared cognitive process might facilitate the restructuring of representations during complex tasks. Students from Mississippi State University participated in studies demonstrating that similar restructuring processes are necessary for successful creative problem-solving and garden path sentence comprehension. Experiment I demonstrated that successful creative problem-solving correlates with successful garden path sentence resolution after removing the variance of non-ambiguous sentence comprehension. Experiment II demonstrated that successful garden path sentence comprehension predicts creative problem-solving, even after controlling for working memory capacity and fluid intelligence. Furthermore, this relationship was unique to creative problem-solving, as garden path comprehension had no bearing on analytic problem-solving success. Results are taken as evidence for a shared cognitive process that aids in revising misrepresented information across certain contexts. This work provides an understanding of how individuals grapple with inconsistencies between the goals of their tasks and their representations of the world.