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

Abstract

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.

A sudden increase in perceptual fluency enhances the probability of an Aha!-like comprehension in remote associate test problems

“…The analysis did not corroborate our hypothesis about the effect of writing. We also hypothesised that coherence judgements might correlate with other problem features, such as solvability, which was obtained in the previous study with the same problems (Moroshkina et al, 2022). For this analysis, only solvable problems were taken because we had respective data about them.…”

“…Ninety Russian language Remote associate problems, of which 68 were solvable (formed by a coherent word triad) and 22 were unsolvable (formed by an incoherent word triad). The solvable problems were taken from the RAT-RUS database developed by Moroshkina et al (2022). The unsolvable problems were created specifically for the experiment.…”

“…Furthermore, the presentation of correct solutions is often accompanied by an Aha! experience (Bowden, & Jung-Beeman, 2003b;Kizilirmak, Wiegmann, & Richardson-Klavehn, 2016;Moroshkina et al, 2022;Webb et al, 2018).…”

“…3) The coherence judgements would correlate with the solvability of the problems taken from the study with the same problems (Moroshkina et al, 2022).…”

Where Does Eureka Come From? The Effect of Unreportable Hints on the Phenomenology of Insight

“…Some researchers obtain the opposite correlation when stressing the affective features of the Aha! experience in the description provided to the participants ( Moroshkina et al 2022 ; Stuyck et al 2021 ). Accordingly, we did not find a correlation between response time and Aha!…”