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.

This commentary on Barutta et al. (IPBS: Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science 44:2, 2010) elaborates the authors' ideas from a new angle. The following positions of the authors are presented and analyzed: emergetism, two different languages of the description of the phenomena, and the notion of "efficient causality". A different approach to the issue of mind-brain interaction is suggested. The key idea of the approach is based not on posing select characteristics which the mind, the brain, or the human consciousness is supposed to have, but on the description of the logic of the activity of this global system, and of the structures that make this characteristics possible to exist.

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The aim of the current work is to study the role of the Aha!-experience in remembering the source of solutions, either self-generated or externally presented. In memory studies there are specific source-monitoring errors, which occur whenever a participant claims to have generated an idea that was derived from different sources (unconscious plagiarism). Several previous studies have shown that experiencing the feeling of Aha! during either problem-solving or the presentation of the correct solutions can have a beneficial relationship to the subsequent recall of the material with the processing of which it was associated. However, studies of the Aha!-experience on the source monitoring task (self-generated solutions vs presented solutions) have not been conducted. In the authors’ study, the hypothesis that the feeling of Aha!, associated with the task being solved, can affect source-monitoring accuracy. During the first stage of the experiment, participants (80 people) had to solve Compound Remote Associates Task items and to estimate whether they had a feeling of Aha!, when either generating the solution or being presented with it in case they failed to generate it. At the second stage, conducted a week later, participants had to recall if the solution was generated by themselves or just presented. The results confirm the generation effect, which manifests itself in successfully recalling problems for which a solution was found (sufficient generation) compared to problems with no-solutions found (fail-to-generate). Participants quite accurately recognized the source of the solution a week later, attributing generated solutions to themselves, while attributing fail-to-generate solutions to the presented ones. However, the authors did not find any additional impact of the Aha!-experience on the problem’s recognition, nor on the sourcemonitoring task performance. In the conclusion of the article, the contradictions of different experimental data concerning the influence of the Aha!-experience on long-term memory and further areas of research is discussed.

Brain systems dealing with multiple meanings of ambiguous stimuli are relatively well studied, while the processing of non-selected meanings is less investigated in the neurophysiological literature and provokes controversy between existing theories. It is debated whether these meanings are actively suppressed and, if yes, whether suppression characterizes any task that involves alternative solutions or only those tasks that emphasize semantic processing or the existence of alternatives. The current functional MRI event-related study used a modified version of the word fragment completion task to reveal brain mechanisms involved in implicit processing of the non-selected solutions of ambiguous fragments. The stimuli were pairs of fragmented adjectives and nouns. Noun fragments could have one or two solutions (resulting in two words with unrelated meanings). Adjective fragments had one solution and created contexts strongly suggesting one solution for ambiguous noun fragments. All fragmented nouns were presented twice during the experiment (with two different adjectives). We revealed that ambiguity resolution was associated with a reduced BOLD signal within several regions related to language processing, including the anterior hippocampi and amygdala and posterior lateral temporal cortex. Obtained findings were interpreted as resulting from brain activity inhibition, which underlies a hypothesized mechanism of suppression of non-selected solutions.