Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - What makes an insight problem? The roles of heuristics, goal conception and solution recoding in knowledge-lean problems.
AU - Chronicle, E. P.
AU - MacGregor, J. N.
AU - Ormerod, T. C.
N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 30 (1), © 2004 American Psychological Association.
PY - 2004/1
Y1 - 2004/1
N2 - 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. Post-solution recoding may account for part of the phenomenology of insight.
AB - 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. Post-solution recoding may account for part of the phenomenology of insight.
KW - Problem solving
KW - insight
M3 - Journal article
VL - 30
SP - 14
EP - 27
JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
SN - 0278-7393
IS - 1
ER -