A cognitive neuroscience perspective on insight as a memory process: encoding the solution

Abstract

This is one of two chapters on "A cognitive neuroscience perspective on insight as a memory process" to be published in the "Routledge International Handbook of Creative Cognition" by L. J. Ball & F. Valleé-Tourangeau (Eds.). While the previous chapter discussed the role of long-term memory for solving problems by insight [https://psyarxiv.com/zv4dk], the current chapter focuses on the role of insight problem solving for long-term memory formation. Insight in problem solving has long been assumed to facilitate memory formation for the problem and its solution. Here, we discuss cognitive, affective, and neurocognitive candidate mechanisms that may underlie learning in insight problem solving. We conclude that insight appears to combine several beneficial effects that each on their own have been found to facilitate long-term memory formation: the generation effect, subjective importance of the discovery of the solution, intrinsic reward, schema congruence, and level-of-processing. A distributed set of brain regions is identified that is associated with these processes. On the one hand, the more affective response related to pleasure, surprise, and novelty detection is linked to amygdala, ventral striatum, and dopaminergic midbrain activity, supporting an important role of reward learning. On the other hand, insight as completing a schema is associated with prior knowledge dependent and medial prefrontal cortex mediated memory formation. Thus, learning by insight may reflect a fast route to cortical memory representations. However, many open questions remain, which we explicitly point out during this review.

The neural basis of the insight memory advantage.

“…The generation effect entails that items actively generated by individuals such as forming associations, word-stem completion or drawings, are better retained compared to those passively processed [26], [27]. This effect appearing consistent across different insight tasks and subsequent memory assessment methods [3], [4], [10], [28], [29], [30] is believed to involve heightened cognitive effort leading to deeper processing levels [31]. However, this effect improves memory for solutions regardless of whether insight is involved or not, indicating it is not specific to insight.…”

“…When a person has an insight, we will argue, this is a unique situation where those memory enhancing properties of behaviorally significant events come together. However, despite considerable progress in recent years, little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms to this particular phenomenon [10]. The field of neuroscience concerning insight is relatively new and has faced challenges investigating it under controlled settings [11], [12].…”

“…The Aha! experience refers to the solver's conviction that the solution is correct, surprising, emerged suddenly, and is associated with a feeling of internal pleasure and reward [10], [18], [19]. Insight solutions, along with their prior knowledge reorganization, are largely associated with unconscious processing, often emerging as if disconnected from conscious thought [15], [20].…”

“…Surprise and reward, integral to the Aha! experience [10], are closely related to prediction errors (PE), which are pivotal in explaining learning across models of reinforcement learning, perceptual inference, and memory (see Box 3;…”

Exploratory exploitation and exploitative exploration: The phenomenology of play and the computational dynamics of search

“…Insight is a fundamental process in creative problemsolving that occurs when a non-obvious problem is solved via a novel solution approach often eliciting an AHA experience (Danek, Williams, & Wiley, 2020;Dietrich & Kanso, 2010). The AHA experience describes the solver's conviction that the solution arrived suddenly, is surprising, certainly correct, involves a feeling of pleasure and internal reward (Kizilirmak & Becker, 2023). Due to its close conceptual proximity to surprise and reward, the AHA!…”