Psychological research on insight problem solving

Michael Öllinger, Günther Knoblich

Research output: Contribution to Book/Report typesChapterpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

"Albert! How did you find the theory of relativity?" Max Wertheimer, the famous Gestalt psychologist, posed this question to his friend Albert Einstein in an attempt to understand the genesis of Einstein's groundbreaking scientific discovery (Wertheimer, 1959). Together they reconstructed the thinking processes underlying the discovery in several conversations and stumbled upon an ingenious thought experiment that Einstein had come up with. He considered it as the turning point where suddenly many open questions that had bothered his mind for a long time were easily and almost effortlessly resolved. Imagine you are travelling in the middle of a moving train while two bolts simultaneously strike the front and the back of the train. Imagine further that there is an external observer at the embankment of the railway. Would you perceive the struck of the bolts as being simultaneous? Would the observer? Einstein recognized that the moving person and the observer would likely give different answers. This, in turn, led him to the crucial insight that physical measurements depend on particular frames of reference. Einstein's postulate about the "relativity of observations" had an extreme impact on the type of explanations that were conceivable in physics (Gruber, 1995; Knoblich and ̈ Ollinger, 2006). Although many anecdotes describe flashes of insight as coming out of the blue, this was not the case for Einstein (and probably also not for other famous scientists who made important discoveries). Einstein had, of course, a profound knowledge in classical physics and mathematics. Nevertheless, he pondered for months and even years on the problems that led to the discovery of the theory of relativity. However, his expertise, shared with many other physicists at the time, was insufficient to find the right answers. The problem was not a lack of expertise or intellectual power. The problem was that the known theories and findings had to be seen, combined, structured, or integrated in a completely new way. Einstein's thought experiment allowed him to achieve this restructuring. Of course, not everybody is a genius. Nevertheless, research in psychology has shown that insight is a general phenomenon that can also be observed in the average person. We get stuck with a problem we are actually competent to solve, but it seems unsolvable even if we try very hard, until at some point the solution appears out of the blue. Psychological research calls the processes that lead to such insights restructuring processes. In this contribution we will provide an overview of the cognitive and neural mechanisms enabling the restructuring of problems and the resulting insights. We start with potential definitions of the term "insight" and point out the problems with such definitions. We then sketch the Gestalt psychologists' view of productive thinking that initiated psychological research on insight at the beginning of the 20th century. Next we discuss cognitive psychologists' attempts to understand the "mysterious insight phenomenon" (Bowden et al., 2005) using computational models of thinking. Finally, we give an overview of current perspectives discussed in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationRecasting Reality
Subtitle of host publicationWolfgang Pauli's Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science
PublisherSpringer Berlin Heidelberg
Pages275-300
Number of pages26
ISBN (Print)9783540851974
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes

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