Insight and search in Katona’s five-square problem

Öllinger, M, Jones, G ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3867-9947 and Knoblich, G, 2014. Insight and search in Katona’s five-square problem. Experimental Psychology, 61 (4), pp. 263-272. ISSN 1618-3169

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Abstract

Insights are often productive outcomes of human thinking. We provide a cognitive model that explains insight problem solving by the interplay of problem space search and representational change, whereby the problem space is constrained or relaxed based on the problem representation. By introducing different experimental conditions that either constrained the initial search space or helped solvers to initiate a representational change, we investigated the interplay of problem space search and representational change in Katona’s five-square problem.
Testing 168 participants, we demonstrated that independent hints relating to the initial search space and to representational change had little effect on solution rates. However, providing both hints caused a significant increase in solution rates. Our results show the interplay between problem space search and representational change in insight problem solving: The initial problem space can be so large that people fail to encounter impasse, but even when representational change is achieved the resulting problem space can still provide a major obstacle to finding
the solution.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Experimental Psychology
Creators:	Öllinger, M., Jones, G. and Knoblich, G.
Publisher:	Hogrefe
Date:	2014
Volume:	61
Number:	4
ISSN:	1618-3169
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1027/1618-3169/a000245 DOI
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	EPrints Services
Date Added:	09 Oct 2015 11:06
Last Modified:	09 Jun 2017 13:49
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/22777

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