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Abstract
This paper explores the effect of different types of incubation task (visual, numerical and verbal) with various levels of attentional focus and cognitive effort (non-demanding, low-demanding and high-demanding) on the resolution of insight problems. The most effective was found to be the low-demanding task (regardless of its nature), which although requiring attentional focus, leaves resources available for the unconscious analytical restructuring process, obtaining a high percentage of success in solving the problem shortly after completion of the incubation task. Overall findings support the hypothesis of Unconscious Analytic Thought (UAT), according to which the restructuring required in insight problem solving implies a covert thinking process that includes a relevant, analytic and goal-oriented search. The findings are discussed in the light of UAT and are compared with the main theories of insight in problem solving.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Veronica Cucchiarini, Ph.D., Dr. Francesco Poli, Dr. Michela Vezzoli, Dr. Federico Luigi Perlino and Dr. Frances Anderson for their kind cooperation and for the insightful suggestions they brought to the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Macchi and Bagassi (Citation2012, Citation2015) provided experimental evidence for this hypothesis regarding misunderstanding by specifically testing four insight problems: the Pigs in a Pen, the Square and Parallelogram, the Study Window, and the Bat and Ball. The authors showed that a reformulation of greater relevance of the problems, by eliminating the critical elements responsible for the misinterpretation (while keeping the rest of the problem unchanged), allowed participants to re-interpret and solve the problem to a greater extent.
2 Furthermore, in our view, retaining in memory during incubation a problem that caused an impasse could even be a hindrance rather than a benefit in solving insight problems as it would strengthen fixation.
3 We established the demandingness of the various incubation tasks through several pre-tests, described in the Materials section of the two studies.
4 Students from the faculty of Psychology who attended the Psychology of Thinking course were excluded from both our experiments since they could be familiar with insight problem solving; participants who already knew the Pigs in a Pen Problem used in the experiment were also excluded.
5 The pilot study was conducted on a sample of 20 participants who indicated that they had reached an impasse after an average of 4 min 15 sec from the start.
6 Participants who continued to work on the insight problem after the average preparation period time were excluded from the incubation phase in two cases, because they took too long over the preparation period, and when they solved the problem shortly during this period of time.
7 The number of participants excluded from the analysis could be attributed to the fact that the experiment was carried out online.
8 It was very difficult to think up a mathematical task that could be considered as non-demanding, so we defined this task as very low-demanding. In fact, given its characteristics, this task resembles the three-digit mathematical task more than to the drawing task as it requires a continuous attentional focus.
9 All insight problems (even those classified as visual) having verbal instructions that often contain the critical point, involve both visual and verbal processing as demonstrated by the reformulation effect in the Pigs in a Pen Problem (Macchi & Bagassi, Citation2012). In fact, the misunderstanding that blocks the solution to this problem can be eliminated by modifying the text, resulting in a significant increase in the number of correct answers (see also Bagassi & Macchi, Citation2016; Macchi & Bagassi, Citation2015).
10 This topic has already been investigated by Gilhooly et al. (Citation2013) who found that an incubation task of a dissimilar nature with respect to the target task, led to stronger benefits for incubation than a task of similar nature. However, the target tasks they adopted to study divergent thinking, were not insight problems but a different type of task, i.e., creative tasks.
11 Moss et al. (Citation2007), on the other hand, conducted a study with RAT problems in which hints were provided in the open goal condition.
12 We used the Bayesian contingency table analysis to assess the strength of evidence in favor of the hypotheses that there are no differences in performance in the conditions with and without the open goal. The statistical analysis was conducted using JASP (free sotware). The Bayes factor suggested that the hypothesis predicting no differences between groups is 2.525 times more likely than the alternative hypothesis. This can be considered as moderate evidence in favor of our hypothesis (Lee & Wagenmakers, Citation2013).
13 As already explained and discussed in Experiment 2, the one-digit mathematical task can be considered a very low-demanding task rather than a non-demanding task on the basis of the characteristics relevant to the present study (attentional focus and moderate expenditure of cognitive resources).