Visual Thinking

The task of the first puzzle was to find two of the colored groups that have the same visible area. The first visual thinking method I used was matching. I attempted to match the shapes in one color to another. As the shapes do not match identically, this method didn't solve the puzzle by itself. I did match pieces that were identical to each other and marked them with an "x". The remaining pieces were not exactly the same, so I had to use visual reasoning to arrive at the correct answer. A whole circle next to a circle overlapped on both sides, is the same as two circles each overlapped once.

My coworker Angie tried to solve the puzzle in a similar way. Rather than focusing on matching the shapes, she attempted to match the identical groups based on the overlapping and underlapping of the shapes. She arrived at the answer of yellow and blue which is incorrect.

The second puzzle included 12 configurations of squares and the test was to find 6 identical pairs. This puzzle required me to rotate the objects and try to visualize what they would look like from different directions. As this was the only method I used, I only got 3 out of the 6 correct.

In addition to the rotation method, my coworker used the matching method to solve the puzzle. When rotating proved to be complicated, she tried matching the configurations based on the location at which each set of three squares joined another. Angie's orthographic imagination proved to be more successful as she got 4 out of 6 correct.