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An underexplored aspect of the relationship between analogical reasoning and creativity is its phenomenology; in particular, the notion that analogical reasoning is related to insight and its associated "aha!" experience. However, the relationship between these phenomena has never been directly investigated. We adapted a set of verbal analogy stimuli for use as an insight task. Across the two experiments, participants reported stronger aha moments and greater representational change when reasoning about analogies with greater internal semantic distance, relative to those with greater internal semantic consistency. Aha strength increased linearly with changes in participants' verbal descriptions of the analogy over the course of each trial, indicating that aha experiences accompany changes in mental representation. The relationship between subjective difficulty and aha strength followed an inverted U-shaped function, with aha strength increasing with greater difficulty but dropping at the highest levels. A similar pattern was observed for the relationship between confidence and aha strength. Furthermore, participants in a more positive mood rated aha experiences as stronger. These findings provide evidence that analogical reasoning can give rise to the phenomenology of insight by triggering representational change and suggest that the affective consequences of relational reasoning may play an important role in promoting creative cognition.

To solve a new problem, people spontaneously engage multiple cognitive processes. Previous work has identified a diverse set of oscillatory components critical at different stages of creative problem solving. In this project, we use hidden state modeling to untangle the roles of oscillation processes over time as people solve puzzles. Building on earlier work, we further developed analytical methods, such as incorporating source separating techniques and identifying the optimal number of states using cross-validation. We extracted brain states characterized by spatio-spectral topographies from time-resolved EEG spectral powers. The data driven approach allowed us to infer the dynamic, trial-by-trial, state sequences, and provided a comprehensive depiction of how various oscillation components interact recurrently throughout the trial. The properties of the states suggest their dissociable cognitive functions. For example, we identified three states with dominant activation in alpha bands but having distinct spatial distributions. People were differentially engaged in these states depending on the stages (e.g., onset or response) and outcomes of the trials (solved with insight or analysis). The current approach, applicable to many tasks requiring extended trial duration, can potentially reconcile findings from previous EEG studies and drive new hypotheses to further our understanding of the complex creative process.

Behavioral and neuroimaging findings indicate that distinct cognitive and neural processes underlie solving problems with sudden insight. Moreover, people with less focused attention sometimes perform better on tests of insight and creative problem solving. However, it remains unclear whether different states of attention, within individuals, influence the likelihood of solving problems with insight or with analysis. In this experiment, participants (N = 40) performed a baseline block of verbal problems, then performed one of two visual tasks, each emphasizing a distinct aspect of visual attention, followed by a second block of verbal problems to assess change in performance. After participants engaged in a center-focused flanker task requiring relatively focused visual attention, they reported solving more verbal problems with analytic processing. In contrast, after participants engaged in a rapid object identification task requiring attention to broad space and weak associations, they reported solving more verbal problems with insight. These results suggest that general attention mechanisms influence both visual attention task performance and verbal problem solving.

Issues surrounding the discreteness or continuity of cognitive processes have played a major role in experimental psychology, although there has been relatively little work that directly addresses these topics. Nevertheless, there has been a shift away from discrete models and toward continuous ones. The research reported in this article demonstrates discrete processing of information in an anagram task selected because of its similarity to insight problems, which seem subjectively to produce discrete 'illumination' during processing. The authors used speed-accuracy decomposition (SAD), a relatively new technique for investigating the time course of information processing. The results of 2 experiments indicate little or no partial information in the anagram tasks, in contrast to previous research with SAD, all of which has revealed partial information. General models of human information processing must therefore be able to account for both patterns.