Mental fixation and metacognitive predictions of insight in creative problem solving

Abstract

Five experiments examined the influence of exposure to fixating information on metacognitive judgements of insight in creative problem solving. Participants were briefly presented with a series of Remote Associates Test problems and were asked to predict the likelihood of solving the problems at a later time. Before making predictions, however, participants were exposed to cue–response pairs designed to induce fixation. Although participants solved fewer problems in this fixation condition than in a baseline condition, when it came to making predictions, participants were just as confident in their ability to solve problems in the fixation condition as they were in the baseline condition. In fact, in some experiments, participants were significantly more confident in the fixation condition than in the baseline condition. These results suggest that people may not take into account the fixating effects of nontarget information when making judgements about their ability to solve problems.

Keywords:

• Creative problem solving
• Fixation
• Metacognition
• Remote associates test

We thank the members of CogMAP for their constructive comments and Olivia Altamirano, Jamie Grinkevich, Lisa Howard, Prachi Mistry, and Payton Small for their assistance with data collection and coding.

Notes

¹Readers might be concerned that the mean judgement ratings were so close to .50, which might suggest that participants provided mostly ratings of 5 on the 0–10 scale. An examination of the judgements, however, revealed that only 21% of the problems were rated as a 5, and 49% of the problems were rated as being 3 and below or 7 and above, suggesting that participants did provide a good range of judgements.