Conceptual Expansion Induced by Analogical Reasoning Sparks “Aha” Moments

Abstract

An underexplored aspect of the relationship between analogical reasoning and creativity is its phenomenology; in particular, the notion that analogical reasoning is related to insight and its associated “aha!” experience. However, the relationship between these phenomena has never been directly investigated. We adapted a set of verbal analogy stimuli for use as an insight task. Across two experiments, participants reported stronger aha moments and greater representational change when reasoning about analogies with greater internal semantic distance, relative to those with greater internal semantic consistency. Aha strength increased linearly with changes in participants’ verbal descriptions of the analogy over the course of each trial, indicating that aha experiences accompany changes in mental representation. The relationship between subjective difficulty and aha strength followed an inverted U-shaped function, with aha strength increasing with greater difficulty but dropping at the highest levels. A similar pattern was observed for the relationship between confidence and aha strength. Furthermore, participants in a more positive mood rated aha experiences as stronger. These findings provide evidence that analogical reasoning can give rise to the phenomenology of insight by triggering representational change and suggest that the affective consequences of relational reasoning may play an important role in promoting creative cognition.