What makes an insight problem? The roles of heuristics, goal conception, and solution recoding in knowledge-lean problems.
Four experiments investigated transformation problems with insight characteristics. In Experiment 1, performance on a version of the 6-coin problem that had a concrete and visualizable solution followed a hill-climbing heuristic. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the difficulty of a version of the problem that potentially required insight for solution stems from the same hill-climbing heuristic, which creates an implicit conceptual block. Experiment 3 confirmed that the difficulty of the potential insight solution is conceptual, not procedural. Experiment 4 demonstrated the same principles of move selection on the 6-coin problem and the 10-coin (triangle) problem. It is argued that hill-climbing heuristics provide a common framework for understanding transformation and insight problem solving. Postsolution receding may account for part of the phenomenology of insight.
Chronicle
Edward P
EP
Departmentof Psychology, University of Hawaii, Manoa, HI, USA.
MacGregor
James N
JN
Ormerod
Thomas C
TC
D003071:Cognition; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D011340:Problem Solving; D014743:Videotape Recording