Abstract
Coherence-building is a key concept for a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of intuition and insight problem solving. There are several accounts that address certain aspects of coherence-building. However, there is still no proper framework defining the general principles of coherence-building. We propose a four-stage model of coherence-building. The first stage starts with spreading activation restricted by constraints. This dynamic is a well-defined rule based process. The second stage is characterized by detecting a coherent state. We adopted a fluency account assuming that the ease of information processing indicates the realization of a coherent state. The third stage is designated to evaluate the result of the coherence-building process and assess whether the given problem is solved or not. If the coherent state does not fit the requirements of the task, the process re-enters at stage 1. These three stages characterize intuition. For insight problem solving a fourth stage is necessary, which restructures the given representation after repeated failure, so that a new search space results. The new search space enables new coherent states. We provide a review of the most important findings, outline our model, present a large number of examples, deduce potential new paradigms and measures that might help to decipher the underlying cognitive processes.
Highlights
During 1916 Max Wertheimer, the famous Gestaltist, and Einstein had several discussions
Wertheimer was keen to understand Einstein’s outstanding thinking. He realized that Einstein was already puzzled by apparent unanswerable questions at a very early stage, such as: “What would happen if one rode on a ray of light, or what would happen if one ran fast enough? Would the light stop to move?” Einstein felt an incoherence between the novel experimental findings at this time and the given theoretical assumptions
We demonstrated that intuition and insight share some significant features and could be explained within a four-stage model
Summary
During 1916 Max Wertheimer, the famous Gestaltist, and Einstein had several discussions. Wertheimer was keen to understand Einstein’s outstanding thinking He realized that Einstein was already puzzled by apparent unanswerable questions at a very early stage, such as: “What would happen if one rode on a ray of light, or what would happen if one ran fast enough? Would the light stop to move?” Einstein felt an incoherence between the novel experimental findings at this time and the given theoretical assumptions He was not able to put the single pieces together and arrange them in a new coherent picture. The guiding stage is driven by spreading activation within mnemonic networks (Collins and Loftus, 1975) Those activation patterns build up to an implicit and unconscious “perception of coherence” Each clue word is associated with the unknown target word (solution)
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