Learning from insight - disentangling cognitive and affective components of the insight memory advantage
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Final Report Abstract
Everyone is familiar with moments of sudden enlightenment – “insight” or “Aha! moments”. After struggling with a difficult problem, the solution pops into mind unexpectedly, offering a completely new perspective on the seemingly unsolvable problem. Typically, the content of such insights is well retained in memory, but it is unclear why. So far, insight has remained difficult to investigate due to a lack of methods for comprehensively assessing both the affective Aha! experience and the cognitive component of representational change. The overarching question of this project was why there is superior memory for insight solutions compared to solutions without insight. The first step towards this goal was to develop and test feasible methods in a series of studies. From September 2015 until September 2017, we conducted seven studies with 566 participants at the Psychology Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago, IL. We broke down the multi-faceted Aha! experience into several dimensions such as pleasure and relief which were assessed separately. With regard to restructuring, importance-to-solution ratings of action verbs turned out to be a valid index of solvers’ problem representations. We could show that the Aha! experience and sudden restructuring are closely connected, confirming the theoretical assumption that insight is characterized by a sudden switch to a correct representation, as opposed to a more gradual process. Pleasure has been suggested as a possible factor, so we manipulated the extent of pleasure experienced during solving to see whether this would influence later recall of solutions. This was not the case. Instead, certainty predicted later recall of solutions. This finding pointed us to a new aspect, namely the question of what role the actual correctness of solutions could play with respect to memory. We found that the relationship between Aha! and recall changes as a function of solution correctness. Across several studies, there was a consistent main effect of correctness, with correct solutions being more likely to be remembered than incorrect ones. The exact role of the restructuring component could not be clarified yet, because data analysis of the last study is still ongoing. With regard to elucidating the phenomenology of the Aha! experience, we found that whenever problem solvers report Aha!, they also have pleasant feelings in the moment of solution, feel that the solution has come to them all at once and are certain that their solution is correct. In fact, our studies showed that this intuitive sense of success is justified, because Aha! solutions are more likely to be true than those where this special feeling is missing. Thus, an important general lesson from this project is that we can trust our Aha! experiences.
Publications
- (2020) Closing the gap: connecting sudden representational change to the subjective Aha! experience in insightful problem solving. Psychological research 84 (1) 111–119
Danek, Amory H.; Williams, Joshua; Wiley, Jennifer
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-0977-8) - (2020) Moment of Truth: Why Aha! Experiences are Correct. J Creat Behav (The Journal of Creative Behavior) 54 (2) 484–486
Danek, Amory H.; Salvi, Carola
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1002/jocb.380) - (2017). What about false insights? Deconstructing the Aha! experience along its multiple dimensions for correct and incorrect solutions separately. Frontiers in Psychology, 7:2077
Danek, A. H., & Wiley, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02077) - (2018). Magic tricks, sudden restructuring and the Aha! experience: A new model of non-monotonic problem solving. In: F. Vallee-Tourangeau (Ed.), Insight: On the origins of new ideas. London: Routledge. S. 51-78
Danek, A. H.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315268118)
