Abstract
Insight is an important cognitive process in creative thinking. The present research applied embodied cognitive perspective to explore the effect of embodied guidance on insight problem solving and its underlying mechanisms by two experiments. Experiment 1 used the matchstick arithmetic problem to explore the role of embodied gestures guidance in problem solving. The results showed that the embodied gestures facilitate the participants’ performance. Experiment 2 investigated how embodied attention guidance affects insight problem solving. The results showed that participants performed better in prototypical guidance condition. Experiment 2a adopted the Duncker’s radiation problem to explore how embodied behavior and prototypical guidance influence problem solving by attention tracing techniques. Experiment 2b aimed to further examine whether implicit attention transfer was the real cause which resulted in participants over-performing in prototypical guidance condition in Experiment 2a. The results demonstrated that overt physical motion was unnecessary for individuals to experience the benefits of embodied guidance in problem solving, which supported the reciprocal relation hypothesis of saccades and attention. In addition, the questionnaire completed after experiments showed that participants did not realize the relation between guidance and insight problem solving. Taken together, the current study provided further evidence for that embodied gesture and embodied attention both facilitated the insight problem solving and the facilitation is implicit.
Highlights
Insight is an important cognitive process in creative thinking
Post-experiment Questionnaires Analyses Post-experiment questionnaires aimed to find out whether participants realized the connection between guidance and problem solving, and the results showed that 5 participants realized that there was a link between the guidance and problem solving (2 in G condition, 3 in M condition), the other 87 participants didn’t realize the connection
The result of Experiment 2b showed that attention tracing and attention transferring in prototypical guidance condition both facilitated the solution of insight problem
Summary
Insight is an important cognitive process in creative thinking. Exploring insight and its underlying mechanism helped us understand creative thinking better. Other than solving general problem, individuals cannot explain problem solving steps or process; insight problem solving is an “aha” experience in which participants suddenly and intuitively understand complex situations or seize the key to the problem (Bowden and Jung-Beeman, 2007). The well-established cognitive theories interpreting insight problem solving are representational change theory, progress monitor theory, and prototype heuristic theory (Zhang et al, 2004). Recently increasing attention has been focused on how individual’s body (e.g., feelings, motion, and active state) influences problem representation and transformation (Stepper and Strack, 1993; Williams and Bargh, 2008; Ball and Litchfield, 2017)
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