John Kihlstrom - Intuition, Incubation, and Insight

Intuition Incubation Insight. (n.d.). https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jfkihlstrom/Underwood96.htm

Objective

This chapter focuses on intuition and how the unconscious mind plays a role in problem-solving, modelling it. In particular, there’s a lot of emphasis on problem-solving experience

These phenomena, which have long intrigued observers of problem solving, have also long eluded scientific analysis — in part because they seem to implicate unconscious processes

• The unconscious mind is not explainable yet. We don’t know nor have we extensively studied it. Many people believe that the unconscious is non-computable
• Most research has focused on problem-solving performance and not on problem-solving experience

Wallas used the term intimation to refer to “that moment in the Illumination stage when our fringe-consciousness of an association-train is in the state of rising consciousness which indicates that the fully conscious flash of success is coming”

• In other words, it’s when you know you’re getting closer to solving a problem and you have cracked the code but you can’t explain how. You just know it

• Intuition and incubation = Implicit cognition

• Differences between explicit and implicit memory

Action	Implicit affected	Explicit affected
Change in mode of presentation	Y	N
Elaborative encoding	N	Y

Intuition, so defined, is a form of metacognition reflecting people’s knowledge or beliefs about their cognitive states and processes

Metamemory is one’s self-assessment of their memory and recall. Feeling-of-Knowing (FOK) is one type of metamemory (“How much do you feel like you know it?“)

• Metamemory judgments are mediated by two different processes
  • Trace-access - Thinkers gain access to part of the information’s memory trace. This is when they can describe the orthographic and phonemic characteristics of something but they cannot recall it per se
  • Inference - When someone bases their FOK on previous instances of that information that has been found by them

Feelings-of-Warmth (FOW) is a type of metacognitive assessment that describes how close we are getting towards figuring out a problem’s solution

$$\text{FOK : Knowledge :: FOW : Problem Solving}$$

General Problem Solver may explain FOW’s mechanism

• Difference reduction - The problem space (initial state, goal state, current state, intermediate states). The thinker tries to reduce the difference between the current state and the goal state

• Means-end analysis - The thinker tries to eliminate or reduce the most important differences between the current state and the goal state

• [?] I don’t understand this well. Read on GPS and identify the differences between diff. reduction and ME analysis

• Sometimes, the difference may increase and that’s when the thinker has to backpedal

• FOW is the distance between where the thinker’s at and where the thinker should be at

• FOWs are not accurate in solving problems that involves insight production. FOW remains stable and low until the absolute end - Either no intuition is used or the intuitions are erroneous

• Autonomous activation - Activation of incubation that happens on its own without depending on any external stimuli

• Interactive activation - External stimuli may be necessary to activate incubation

• Interactions and external inputs are also important in unconscious problem solving, and this often invokes associative thinking

• Evidence of intuition in problem solving was found in several tests

  • Remote Associations Test (RAT)
    • Dyads of Triads (DOT)
    • Accumulated Clues Test (ACT)