Study suggests insight involves exploring greater distances within a solution space

When humans are trying to grasp a complicated concept or solve a problem, they might suddenly feel like they have gained a deeper understanding or think of something they had not thought of before. This type of ‘aha’ moments, broadly referred to as ‘insight’, can play a key role in their ultimate ability to acquire new valuable knowledge or solve the problem at hand.

Many psychological studies have tried to paint a clearer picture of how insight surfaces and how it contributes to problem-solving. While these studies introduced various interesting theories, the dynamic process that leads to the emergence of insight remains poorly understood.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo recently set out to further explore this dynamic process using a combination of experimental methods and simulation tools. Their paper, published in Communications Psychology, suggests that insight is characterized by an exploration of wider distances within the space of possible solutions to a problem, ultimately providing more options for the person solving the problem to consider.

“Insight represents a sudden and profound understanding, offering a new perspective that can offer the solution to a previously intractable problem,” wrote Zenas C. Chao, Feng-Yang Hsieh, and Chien-Te Wu in their paper. “Insight is tightly associated with an ‘aha’ experience. Although various theories have attempted to explain how insight emerges, the dynamic search process leading to insight remains poorly understood, primarily due to the complex nature of creative problem-solving.”

To investigate insight and the process fueling its emergence, the researchers carried out a series of experiments involving 105 participants. These participants were asked to complete a task that required them to find a common association between three seemingly unrelated logographic characters used in the writing of Japanese language, also known as Kanji.

“In this study, we employ two versions of the Japanese remote associates test (RAT) (n = 349 and n = 105 participants, respectively), alongside a simulation model,” wrote Chao, Hsieh and Wu. “This allows us to quantitatively manipulate the constraints imposed on the problem and to track the search process within the solution space.”

The researchers conducted two experimental trials, for which they used different variations of the RAT association task. In the first experiment, they controlled for the participants’ level of fixation on the task and looked at how this influenced their performance (i.e., their ability to uncover associations between Kanji).

In this context, the term fixation refers to the undesirable focus on the same thoughts that are not helpful for solving RAT association tests. In contrast, de-fixation entails setting aside these ‘incorrect thoughts’ and exploring alternative possibilities, which can help to solve a problem.

In the second experiment, the researchers asked participants to record their every thought while they were trying to complete the task, just as it occurred. Finally, the researchers used a model to simulate how the minds of participants navigated a corpus containing words in the Japanese language to solve the RAT tasks.

“Our findings indicate that the insight and the accompanying ‘aha’ moment are characterized by exploration that spans greater distances within the solution space, thereby increasing the number of potential solutions available for evaluation,” wrote the researchers.

The results of this study shed new light on the insight-driven creative thinking processes that contribute to people’s ability to solve problems, by exploring a wider range of possible solutions. In the future, the way in which Chao, Hsieh and Wu framed insight and the simulation model they employed could inspire further similar experiments employing other creative tasks or involving larger numbers of participants, which could ultimately lead to new interesting observations.

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