Eliciting false insights with semantic priming

Abstract

The insight experience (or ‘Aha moment’) generally evokes strong feelings of certainty and confidence. An ‘Aha’ experience for a false idea could underlie many false beliefs and delusions. However, for as long as insight experiences have been studied, false insights have remained difficult to elicit experimentally. That difficulty, in turn, highlights the fact that we know little about what causes people to experience a false insight. Across two experiments (total N = 300), we developed and tested a new paradigm to elicit false insights. In Experiment 1 we used a combination of semantic priming and visual similarity to elicit feelings of insight for incorrect solutions to anagrams. These false insights were relatively common but were experienced as weaker than correct ones. In Experiment 2 we replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and found that semantic priming and visual similarity interacted to produce false insights. These studies highlight the importance of misleading semantic processing and the feasibility of the solution in the generation of false insights.

The illusion of insight: Detailed warnings reduce but do not prevent false "Aha!" moments

“…This procedure reliably elicits "Aha!" moments for incorrect solutions at a far greater rate than the level of false insights experienced for control anagrams (Grimmer et al, 2022a).…”

“…On trials where participants responded 'yes' to experiencing an insight moment, and the solution they provided was incorrect, this was coded as a false insight. As in our previous studies (Grimmer et al, 2022a), solutions were only regarded as incorrect when either the intended (primed) solution (e.g., MONUMENT…”

“…For example, NLATONALIITS looks like NATIONALISTS when scrambled, but the correct solution is actually INSTALLATION. These primed lures induce more false insights than the non-lure anagrams by virtue of their visual similarity to the primed associate (Grimmer et al, 2022a).…”

“…The focal independent variable was the type of instructions (e.g., warnings) given to participants. In addition to the original instructions used in Grimmer et al (2022a), we created two new conditions with different instructional videos (see the OSF for the videos and Appendix A for the full transcripts) designed to reduce or eliminate the false insight effect of the primed lure anagrams. By creating these three conditions, we can observe whether there is an effect of awareness in preventing false insights.…”

Unique Effects of Sedatives, Dissociatives, Psychedelics, Stimulants, and Cannabinoids on Episodic Memory: A Review and Reanalysis of Acute Drug Effects on Recollection, Familiarity, and Metamemory

“…That is, recollection may constrain the interpretation of increased familiarity, and an enhancement or preservation of familiarity along with a concurrent impairment in recollection may not necessarily be an overall enhancement per se. Semantic activation, which can drive familiarity, can result in feelings of insight (even in the absence of Unique acute drug effects on episodic memory veridical insights; Grimmer et al, 2022), and déjà vu, premonition (feeling that one can predict the future), and presque vu (feeling that one is on the verge of an insight) are illusory phenomena associated with conditions of high familiarity and low recollection (Cleary et al, 2012;Kostic et al, 2015;Cleary and Claxton, 2018). Anecdotally, users of psychedelics report having insights under the influence of psychedelics, yet it is unknown whether these insights are tangibly realized in a reliable or frequent fashion.…”