Abstract

Consider the anecdote of King Hiero asking Archimedes to prove that the amount of gold in his newly made crown equals the amount of gold given to the goldsmiths. Archimedes considers the problem for some time, and becomes stuck in an impasse – he simply cannot see a solution. Some days later when taking a bath, he notices that his body displaces the water in the bath tub. Immediately, he has his flash of insight and runs naked through the streets, crying out “Eureka! – I have found it” (Gruber, 1995). Archimedes clearly had the necessary knowledge to solve the problem, so why was it so hard for him to gain his insight? How was he able to overcome the impasse in which he was stuck? Insight is still a “mysterious” phenomenon within problem solving literature. Currently, there are at least two theoretical accounts that try to explain the processes involved in insight problem solving in order to “demystify insight” (Bowden et al. 2005): The first stresses the importance of heuristics (MacGregor, Ormerod, & Chronicle, 2001); the second stresses the necessity of a representational change (Ohlsson, 1992). In this paper we make a further attempt to systematically disentangle the influence of heuristics ABSTRACT

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