Verbal insight revisited — dissociable neurocognitive processes underlying solutions accompanied by an AHA! experience with and without prior restructuring

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we investigate insight problem solving by exploring the subjective AHA! experience as a function of restructuring of a problem. It has long been assumed that the AHA! experience is the direct consequence of restructuring. However, we will argue that (a) the AHA! experience does not always result from prior restructuring and that (b) solutions with accompanied AHA! do not underlie a single neurocognitive process. In this regard, we use a modified compound remote associates (CRA) paradigm designed to experimentally dissociate restructuring from the AHA! experience. Results indicate that solutions accompanied by an AHA! are often found also in the absence of restructuring. This finding is explained by proposing distinct CRA solution processes that differentiate between AHA! solutions with and without restructuring. We predict that solutions with accompanied AHA! experience differ in their behavioural, neural and eye-tracking related signature as a function of restructuring. The results support these predictions. Implications for insight research are: 1) it cannot be implied anymore that restructuring has occurred by only measuring the subjective AHA! experience especially using CRAs; 2) it is vital to experimentally separate different components of insight to understand its underlying diverse neurocognitive processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Insight
• aha experience
• restructuring
• eye-tracking
• fMRI

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the German Science Foundation (SFB 936/C7) [MB, SK], the German Science Foundation (DFG KU 3322/1-1) [SK], the European Research Council (ERC-2016-StG-Self-Control-677804) [SK]. We want to thank Dr Gregor Wiedemann for providing the semantic distances between the word pairs and Prof. Dr Christian Büchel and his institute for providing the eye-tracking facilities.

Anonymised behavioural and eye-tracking data are available from https://zenodo.org/record/3782718 for researchers who meet the criteria for access to confidential data. Anonymised fMRI data will be shared upon reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Kounios and Beeman assume that insight involves „a reorganization of the elements of a person’s mental representation of a stimulus, situation or event to yield a non-obvious or non-dominant interpretation (Kounios & Beeman, 2014, p. 88).

2 Note, there are CRA problems that are solved in two or fewer seconds. Most likely the solution word was directly activated by the target words. These kinds of solutions are considered as neither insight nor trial and error solutions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Science Foundation [SFB 936/C7] [MB, SK], the European Research Council [ERC-2016-StG-Self-Control-677804] [SK].