Leveraging Speech to Identify Signatures of Insight and Transfer in Problem Solving
For cognitive scientists studying problem-solving and insight, this work provides evidence linking verbalization to transferable insights, though it is an incremental contribution to understanding insight mechanisms.
The study found that participants who solved problems requiring the same type of insight improved more rapidly and talked more, including spontaneously categorizing problems, compared to those solving different types, suggesting that transferable insights are accessible for verbal report.
Many problems seem to require a flash of insight to solve. What form do these sudden insights take, and what impact do they have on how people approach similar problems in the future? In this work, we prompted participants (N = 189) to talk aloud as they attempted to solve a sequence of five "matchstick-arithmetic" problems. These problems either all relied on the same kind of non-obvious solution (Same group) or a different kind each time (Different group). We found that Same participants improved more rapidly than Different participants, and as they improved, they talked more and talked about different things when solving later problems. Specifically, they were more likely to spontaneously categorize the problem they were working on. Taken together, these findings suggest that a hallmark of transferable insights is their accessibility for verbal report, even if the underlying precursors of insight remain difficult to articulate.