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CONTRIBUTORS:
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JOURNAL:
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YEAR:
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2005
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PUB TYPE:
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Journal Article
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SUBJECT(S):
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problem solving, insight, cognitive psychology
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DISCIPLINE:
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Psychology
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HTTP:
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LANGUAGE:
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English
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PUB ID:
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103-417-214
(Last edited on
2005/07/02 01:23:19 GMT-6)
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SPONSOR(S):
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ABSTRACT:
Despite many decades of study, scientists still puzzle over the process of insight. By what mechanism does a person experience that "Aha!" moment, when sudden clarity emerges from a tangled web of thoughts and ideas? This research integrates psychological work on insight with graph theoretic work on "small-world" phenomenon, to construct a theory that explains how insight occurs, how it is similar to and different from more typical learning processes, and why it yields an affective response in the individual. I propose that cognitive insight occurs when an atypical association, forged through random recombination or directed search, results in a "shortcut" in an individual's network of representations. This causes a rapid decrease in path length, reorients the individual's understanding of the relationships within and among the affected representations, and can prompt a cascade of other connections. This result is demonstrated by applying graph theoretical analysis to network translations of commonly used insight problems.
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STATISTICS
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