Abstract: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.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.12970 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2605.12970v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.12970 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Linas Nasvytis [view email]
[v1]
Wed, 13 May 2026 04:04:08 UTC (2,309 KB)