Getting a grip on insight: real-time and embodied Aha experiences predict correct solutions

Insight and non-insight problem solving: A heart rate variability study

Occasionally, problems are solved with a sudden Aha! moment (insight), while the mundane approach to solving problems is analytical (non-insight). At first glance, non-insight appears to depend on the availability and taxation of cognitive resources to execute the step-by-step approach, whereas insight does not, or to a lesser extent. However, this remains debated. To investigate the reliance of both solution types on cognitive resources, we assessed the involvement of the prefrontal cortex using vagally mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV) as an index. Participants (N = 68) solved 70 compound remote associates word puzzles solvable with insight and non-insight. Before, during, and after solving the word puzzles, we measured the vmHRV. Our results showed that resting-state vmHRV (trait) showed a negative association with behavioural performance for both solution types. This might reflect inter-individual differences in inhibitory control. As the solution search requires one to think of remote associations, inhibitory control might hamper rather than aid this process. Furthermore, we observed, for both solution types, a vmHRV increase from resting-state to solution search (state), lingering on in the post-task recovery period. This could mark the increase of prefrontal resources to promote an open-minded stance, essential for divergent thinking, which arguably is crucial for this task. Our findings suggest that, at a general level, both solution types share common aspects. However, a closer analysis of early and late solutions and puzzle difficulty suggested that metacognitive differentiation between insight and non-insight improved with higher trait vmHRV, and that a unique association between trait vmHRV and puzzle difficulty was present for each solution type.

"Now I Get It!": Eureka Experiences During the Acquisition of Mathematical Concepts

Many famous scientists have reported anecdotes where a new understanding occurred to them suddenly, in an unexpected flash. Do people generally experience such "Eureka" moments when learning science concepts? And if so, do these episodes truly vehicle sudden insights, or is this impression illusory? To address these questions, we developed a paradigm where participants were taught the mathematical concept of geodesic, which generalizes the common notion of straight line to straight trajectories drawn on curved surfaces. After studying lessons introducing this concept on the sphere, participants (N = 56) were tested on their understanding of geodesics on the sphere and on other surfaces. Our findings indicate that Eureka experiences are common when learning mathematics, with reports by 34 (61%) participants. Moreover, Eureka experiences proved an accurate description of participants' learning, in two respects. First, Eureka experiences were associated with learning and generalization: the participants who reported experiencing Eurekas performed better at identifying counterintuitive geodesics on new surfaces. Second, and in line with the firstperson experience of a sudden insight, our findings suggest that the learning mechanisms responsible for Eureka experiences are inaccessible to reflective introspection. Specifically, reports of Eureka experiences and of participants' confidence in their own understanding were associated with different profiles of performance, indicating that the mechanisms bringing about Eureka experiences and those informing reflective confidence were at least partially dissociated. Learning mathematical concepts thus appears to involve mechanisms that operate unconsciously, except when a key computational step is reached and a sudden insight breaks into consciousness.

Metacognitive Feelings: A Predictive-Processing Perspective

Metacognitive feelings are affective experiences that concern the subject's mental processes and capacities. Paradigmatic examples include the feeling of familiarity, the feeling of confidence, or the tip-of-the-tongue experience. In this article, we advance an account of metacognitive feelings based on the predictive-processing framework. The core tenet of predictive processing is that the brain is a hierarchical hypothesis-testing mechanism, predicting sensory input on the basis of prior experience and updating predictions on the basis of the incoming prediction error. According to the proposed account, metacognitive feelings arise out of a process in which visceral changes serve as cues to predict the error dynamics relating to a particular mental process. The expected rate of prediction-error reduction corresponds to the valence at the core of the emerging metacognitive feeling. Metacognitive feelings use prediction dynamics to model the agent's situation in a way that is both descriptive and directive. Thus, metacognitive feelings are not only an appraisal of ongoing cognitive performance but also a set of action policies. These action policies span predictive trajectories across bodily action, mental action, and interoceptive changes, which together transform the epistemic landscape within which metacognitive feelings unfold.

The Aha! experience is associated with a drop in the perceived difficulty of the problem

The study investigated the correlation between the intensity of the Aha! experience and participants' subjective difficulty ratings of problems before and after finding their solutions. We assumed that the Aha! experience arises from a shift in processing fluency triggered by changing from an initially incoherent problem representation to a coherent one, which ultimately leads to the retrieval of a solution with unexpected ease and speed. First, we hypothesized that higher Aha! experience ratings would indicate more sudden solutions, manifesting in a reduced correlation between the initial difficulty ratings and solution times. Second, we hypothesized that higher Aha! experience ratings would correspond to a greater shift in the subjective difficulty ratings between the initial and retrospective assessments. To test our hypotheses, we developed a novel set of rebus puzzles. A total of 160 participants solved rebuses and provided initial (within 5 s of problem presentation) and retrospective difficulty ratings (following the generation or presentation of a correct solution). They also rated their Aha! experience (after solution generation or presentation), confidence in solutions, and the likability of each rebus. Our findings revealed that the initial ratings of the problem's subjective difficulty were positively correlated with the solution time and that this correlation decreased in the case of a stronger Aha! experience. Aha! experience ratings were positively correlated with the differences between initial and retrospective difficulty ratings, confidence, solution accuracy, and rebus likability. We interpreted our results to be in line with the processing fluency and metacognitive prediction error accounts.

Gestalt's Perspective on Insight: A Recap Based on Recent Behavioral and Neuroscientific Evidence

The Gestalt psychologists' theory of insight problem-solving was based on a direct parallelism between perceptual experience and higher-order forms of cognition (e.g., problem-solving). Similarly, albeit not exclusively, to the sudden recognition of bistable figures, these psychologists contended that problem-solving involves a restructuring of one's initial representation of the problem's elements, leading to a sudden leap of understanding phenomenologically indexed by the "Aha!" feeling. Over the last century, different scholars have discussed the validity of the Gestalt psychologists' perspective, foremost using the behavioral measures available at the time. However, in the last two decades, scientists have gained a deeper understanding of insight problem-solving due to the advancements in cognitive neuroscience. This review aims to provide a retrospective reading of Gestalt theory based on the knowledge accrued by adopting novel paradigms of research and investigating their neurophysiological correlates. Among several key points that the Gestalt psychologists underscored, we focus specifically on the role of the visual system in marking a discrete switch of knowledge into awareness, as well as the perceptual experience and holistic standpoints. While the main goal of this paper is to read the previous theory in light of new evidence, we also hope to initiate an academic discussion and encourage further research about the points we raise.

Investigating the appraisal structure of spontaneous thoughts: evidence for differences among unexpected thought, involuntary autobiographical memories, and ruminative thought

Involuntary thinking occurs when mental states arise without intention. Such thoughts can take different forms, such as involuntary autobiographical memories (IAM), ruminative thoughts, and unexpected thoughts-all of which are popular areas of study, albeit in somewhat disparate literatures. Despite these mental states sharing a common thread of feeling involuntary in nature, it is nevertheless unclear what separates them phenomenologically. We conducted a set of exploratory and confirmatory experiments to elucidate the appraisal dimensions behind these forms of involuntary thought, with a particular interest in understanding the phenomenology behind unexpected thoughts that are predicted to violate expectations of both timing and content. Across two experiments, we found that unexpected thoughts had unique appraisal structures compared to the other two forms of involuntary thought: they were less identifiably cued, more surprising in content and timing, and offered new information (i.e., insight). We discuss how these distinctions support recent theories regarding the nature of unexpected thought and its relation to other forms of involuntary thinking, namely IAM and ruminative thought, which are the more commonly studied forms of involuntary thinking.

Cessations of consciousness in meditation: Advancing a scientific understanding of nirodha samāpatti

Absence of consciousness can occur due to a concussion, anesthetization, intoxication, epileptic seizure, or other fainting/syncope episode caused by lack of blood flow to the brain. However, some meditation practitioners also report that it is possible to undergo a total absence of consciousness during meditation, lasting up to 7 days, and that these "cessations" can be consistently induced. One form of extended cessation (i.e., nirodha samāpatti) is thought to be different from sleep because practitioners are said to be completely impervious to external stimulation. That is, they cannot be 'woken up' from the cessation state as one might be from a dream. Cessations are also associated with the absence of any time experience or tiredness, and are said to involve a stiff rather than a relaxed body. Emergence from meditation-induced cessations is said to have profound effects on subsequent cognition and experience (e.g., resulting in a sudden sense of clarity, openness, and possibly insights). In this paper, we briefly outline the historical context for cessation events, present preliminary data from two labs, set a research agenda for their study, and provide an initial framework for understanding what meditation induced cessation may reveal about the mind and brain. We conclude by integrating these so-called nirodha and nirodha samāpatti experiences-as they are known in classical Buddhism-into current cognitive-neurocomputational and active inference frameworks of meditation.

The illusion of insight: detailed warnings reduce but do not prevent false "Aha!" moments

False "Aha!" moments can be elicited experimentally using the False Insight Anagram Task (FIAT), which combines semantic priming and visual similarity manipulations to lead participants into having "Aha!" moments for incorrect anagram solutions. In a preregistered experiment (N = 255), we tested whether warning participants and explaining to them exactly how they were being deceived, would reduce their susceptibility to false insights. We found that simple warnings did not reduce the incidence of false insights. On the other hand, participants who were given a detailed explanation of the methods used to deceive them experienced a small reduction in false insights compared to participants given no warning at all. Our findings suggest that the FIAT elicits a robust false insight effect that is hard to overcome, demonstrating the persuasive nature of false insights when the conditions are ripe for them.

Disembodied AI and the limits to machine understanding of students' embodied interactions

The embodiment turn in the Learning Sciences has fueled growth of multimodal learning analytics to understand embodied interactions and make consequential educational decisions about students more rapidly, more accurately, and more personalized than ever before. Managing demands of complexity and speed is leading to growing reliance by education systems on disembodied artificial intelligence (dAI) programs, which, ironically, are inherently incapable of interpreting students' embodied interactions. This is fueling a potential crisis of complexity. Augmented intelligence systems offer promising avenues for managing this crisis by integrating the strengths of omnipresent dAI to detect complex patterns of student behavior from multimodal datastreams, with the strengths of humans to meaningfully interpret embodied interactions in service of consequential decision making to achieve a balance between complexity, interpretability, and accountability for allocating education resources to children.

Insight Problem Solving Ability Predicts Reduced Susceptibility to Fake News, Bullshit, and Overclaiming

The information humans are exposed to has grown exponentially. This has placed increased demands upon our information selection strategies resulting in reduced fact-checking and critical-thinking time. Prior research shows that problem solving (traditionally measured using the Cognitive Reflection Test-CRT) negatively correlates with believing in false information. We argue that this result is specifically related to insight problem solving. Solutions via insight are the result of parallel processing, characterized by filtering external noise, and, unlike cognitively controlled thinking, it does not suffer from the cognitive overload associated with processing multiple sources of information. We administered the Compound Remote Associate Test (problems used to investigate insight problem solving) as well as the CRT, 20 fake and real news headlines, the bullshit, and overclaiming scales to a sample of 61 participants. Results show that insight problem solving predicts better identification of fake news and bullshit (over and above traditional measures i.e., the CRT), and is associated with reduced overclaiming. These results have implications for understanding individual differences in susceptibility to believing false information.

Surprise! Why Insightful Solution Is Pleasurable

Insight problems-as a type of ill-defined problems-are often solved without an articulate plan, and finding their solution is accompanied by the Aha! experience (positive feeling from suddenly finding a solution). However, the solution of such problems can also be guided, for example, by expectations in terms of criteria for achieving the goal. We hypothesize that adjusting the expectation accuracy based on the reward prediction error (discrepancy between the reward and its prediction) affects the strength of affective components of the Aha! experience (pleasure and surprise), allowing to learn how to solve similar problems. We manipulated expectation accuracy by varying the similarity in problem solution principle and structure in a short learning set. Each set was followed by a critical problem where both the structure and solution principle were changed (except for control set). Subjective feelings, solution time, and expectation were measured after each problem. The results revealed that problems with similarities become more expected at the end of the set and their solution time is decreased. However, the critical problem featured a rapid increase in pleasure and surprise and decrease in expectedness only in the condition where both the solution principle and structure were expected, suggesting that problem structure is a key feature determining expectedness in insight problem solving. The Aha! experience is not an epiphenomenon; it plays a role in learning of problem solving through adjusting expectations.

Thinking style and psychosis proneness do not predict false insights

The FIAT paradigm (Grimmer et al., 2021) is a novel method of eliciting 'Aha' moments for incorrect solutions to anagrams in the laboratory, i.e. false insights. There exist many documented reports of psychotic symptoms accompanying strong feelings of 'Aha!' (Feyaerts, Henriksen, Vanheule, Myin-Germeys, & Sass, 2021; Mishara, 2010; Tulver, Kaup, Laukkonen, & Aru, 2021), suggesting that the newly developed FIAT could reveal whether people who have more false insights are more prone to psychosis and delusional belief. To test this possibility, we recruited 200 participants to take an adapted version of the FIAT and complete measures of thinking style and psychosis proneness. We found no association between experimentally induced false insights and measures of Schizotypy, Need for Cognition, Jumping to Conclusions, Aberrant Salience, Faith in Intuition, or the Cognitive Reflection Task. We conclude that experiencing false insights might not be constrained to any particular type of person, but rather, may arise for anyone under the right circumstances.

How Difficult Was It? Metacognitive Judgments About Problems and Their Solutions After the Aha Moment

The insight phenomenon is thought to comprise two components: cognitive and affective (the Aha! experience). The exact nature of the Aha! experience remains unclear; however, several explanations have been put forward. Based on the processing fluency account, the source of the Aha! experience is a sudden increase in processing fluency, associated with emerging of a solution. We hypothesized that in a situation which the Aha! experience accompanies the solution in, the problem would be judged as less difficult, regardless of the objective difficulty. We also planned to confirm previously discovered associations between the Aha! experience and accuracy, confidence, and pleasure. To test the proposed hypothesis, during the preliminary stage of the study, we developed a set of 100 remote associate problems in Russian (RAT-RUS) and asked 125 participants to solve problems and indicate the Aha! moment (after solution generation or solution presentation), confidence, difficulty, and likability of each problem. As expected, the Aha! experience often accompanied correct solutions and correlated with confidence judgments. We also found a positive correlation between the Aha! experience and problem likability. As for the main hypothesis, we confirmed that the Aha! experience after the presentation of the solution was associated with a decrease in subjective difficulty. When participants could not solve a problem but experienced the Aha! moment after the solution was presented to them, the problem was perceived as easier than one without the Aha! experience. We didn’t find the same effect for the Aha! after solution generation. Thus, our study partially supports the processing fluency account and demonstrates the association between the Aha! experience and metacognitive judgments about the accuracy and difficulty of problems.

Irrelevant insights make worldviews ring true

Our basic beliefs about reality can be impossible to prove and yet we can feel a strong intuitive conviction about them, as exemplified by insights that imbue an idea with immediate certainty. Here we presented participants with worldview beliefs such as "people's core qualities are fixed" and simultaneously elicited an aha moment. In the first experiment (N = 3000, which included a direct replication), participants rated worldview beliefs as truer when they solved anagrams and also experienced aha moments. A second experiment (N = 1564) showed that the worldview statement and the aha moment must be perceived simultaneously for this 'insight misattribution' effect to occur. These results demonstrate that artificially induced aha moments can make worldview beliefs seem truer, possibly because humans partially rely on feelings of insight to appraise an idea's veracity. Feelings of insight are therefore not epiphenomenal and should be investigated for their effects on decisions, beliefs, and delusions.

Eliciting false insights with semantic priming

The insight experience (or ‘Aha moment’) generally evokes strong feelings of certainty and confidence. An ‘Aha’ experience for a false idea could underlie many false beliefs and delusions. However, for as long as insight experiences have been studied, false insights have remained difficult to elicit experimentally. That difficulty, in turn, highlights the fact that we know little about what causes people to experience a false insight. Across two experiments (total N = 300), we developed and tested a new paradigm to elicit false insights. In Experiment 1 we used a combination of semantic priming and visual similarity to elicit feelings of insight for incorrect solutions to anagrams. These false insights were relatively common but were experienced as weaker than correct ones. In Experiment 2 we replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and found that semantic priming and visual similarity interacted to produce false insights. These studies highlight the importance of misleading semantic processing and the feasibility of the solution in the generation of false insights.

Current Understanding of the "Insight" Phenomenon Across Disciplines

Despite countless anecdotes and the historical significance of insight as a problem solving mechanism, its nature has long remained elusive. The conscious experience of insight is notoriously difficult to trace in non-verbal animals. Although studying insight has presented a significant challenge even to neurobiology and psychology, human neuroimaging studies have cleared the theoretical landscape, as they have begun to reveal the underlying mechanisms. The study of insight in non-human animals has, in contrast, remained limited to innovative adjustments to experimental designs within the classical approach of judging cognitive processes in animals, based on task performance. This leaves no apparent possibility of ending debates from different interpretations emerging from conflicting schools of thought. We believe that comparative cognition has thus much to gain by embracing advances from neuroscience and human cognitive psychology. We will review literature on insight (mainly human) and discuss the consequences of these findings to comparative cognition.

From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind

How profoundly can humans change their own minds? In this paper we offer a unifying account of deconstructive meditation under the predictive processing view. We start from simple axioms. First, the brain makes predictions based on past experience, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. Second, deconstructive meditation brings one closer to the here and now by disengaging anticipatory processes. We propose that practicing meditation therefore gradually reduces counterfactual temporally deep cognition, until all conceptual processing falls away, unveiling a state of pure awareness. Our account also places three main styles of meditation (focused attention, open monitoring, and non-dual) on a single continuum, where each technique relinquishes increasingly engrained habits of prediction, including the predicted self. This deconstruction can also permit certain insights by making the above processes available to introspection. Our framework is consistent with the state of empirical and (neuro)phenomenological evidence and illuminates the top-down plasticity of the predictive mind. Experimental rigor, neurophenomenology, and no-report paradigms are needed to further understanding of how meditation affects predictive processing and the self.