Insight and search in Katona's five-square problem

Michael Öllinger, Gary Jones, Günther Knoblich

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Insights are often productive outcomes of human thinking. We provide a cognitive model that explains insight problem solving by the interplay of problem space search and representational change, whereby the problem space is constrained or relaxed based on the problem representation. By introducing different experimental conditions that either constrained the initial search space or helped solvers to initiate a representational change, we investigated the interplay of problem space search and representational change in Katona's five-square problem. Testing 168 participants, we demonstrated that independent hints relating to the initial search space and to representational change had little effect on solution rates. However, providing both hints caused a significant increase in solution rates. Our results show the interplay between problem space search and representational change in insight problem solving: The initial problem space can be so large that people fail to encounter impasse, but even when representational change is achieved the resulting problem space can still provide a major obstacle to finding the solution.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)263-272
Number of pages10
JournalExperimental Psychology
Volume61
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014

Keywords

  • Insight
  • Problem solving
  • Representational change
  • Search

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