Beautiful mind: grouping of actions into mental schemes leads to a full insight Aha! experience

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the potential connection between solution, elegance and Aha! experience in insight problem-solving. We assume that the basic principle of both Aha! experience and elegance evaluations is a scheme encoding of solution. The compactness of the successful scheme determines the subjective aesthetic judgment of solution elegance and beauty.

To investigate this claim, we used the ten-penny insight problem that has two types of solutions. The first is a schema type which can be portrayed as a simple shape (a star). The second is an asymmetric type described by a system of rules and restrictions. Two experiments were conducted in which participants were asked to find both solution types and evaluate each of them using Aha! experience scales with additional elegance scale. Both experiments indicated that the scheme type solution was rated as more insightful, elegant and sudden compared to the asymmetric type.

KEYWORDS:

• Problem-solving
• insight
• aha! experience
• scheme
• elegance

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation 18-78-10103.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation [18-78-10103].