“The Penny Drops”: Investigating Insight Through the Medium of Cryptic Crosswords

Abstract

A new protocol for eliciting insight (“Aha!”/Eureka) moments is proposed, involving the solving of British-style cryptic crosswords. The mechanics of cryptic crossword clues are briefly explained, and the process is set into the insight literature, with parallels being drawn between several different types of cryptic crossword clues and other insight-triggering problems such as magic, jokes, anagrams, rebus, and remote association puzzles (RAT), as well as “classic” thematic or spatial challenges. We have evidence from a previous survey of cryptic crossword solvers that the “Aha!” moment is the most important driver of continued participation in this hobby, suggesting that the positive emotional “payback” has an energizing effect on a participant's motivation to continue solving. Given the success with which a good quality cryptic crossword elicits “Aha!” moments, cryptics should prove highly valuable in exploring insight under lab conditions. We argue that the crossword paradigm overcomes many of the issues which beset other insight problems: for example, solution rates of cryptic crossword clues are high; new material can easily be commissioned, leading to a limitless pool of test items; and each puzzle contains clues resembling a wide variety of insight problem types, permitting a comparison of heterogeneous solving mechanisms within the same medium. Uniquely among insight problems, considerations of expertise also come into play, allowing us to explore how crossword solving experts handle the deliberate misdirection of the cryptic clue more effectively than non-expert, but equally experienced, peers. Many have debated whether there is such a thing as an “insight problem” per se: typically, problems can be solved with or without insight, depending on the context. We argue that the same is true for cryptic crosswords, and that the key to the successful triggering of insight may lie in both the difficulty of the challenge and the degree to which misdirection has been used. Future research is outlined which explores the specific mechanisms of clue difficulty. This opens the way to an exploration of potential links between solving constraints and the experiencing of the “Aha!” moment, which may shed light on the cognitive processes involved in insight solution.

The phenomenology of Aha-experiences.

“…There is ample empirical evidence that links sudden insight with positive emotions (Cosmelli & Preiss, 2014;Friedlander & Fine, 2018;Gruber, 1995;Kounios & Beeman, 2014). Reber et al (2004) proposed the hedonic fluency hypothesis and argued that fluency is hedonically marked as high fluency elicited positive affect and, moreover, that fluency plays a crucial role for aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic judgements (Leder, Belke, Oeberst, & Augustin, 2004;Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003).…”

“…Cela-Conde et al (2013) exhibited that DMN contribute to aesthetic appreciation and Ogawa et al (2018) found that creative insights include a coupling of DMN, semantic and cerebral-cerebellum networks that contribute to the dopaminergic system and motivational states. Similarly, research has indicated that the Aha-experience might be central in the emotional response system for recognizing novel, good and relevant information (Danek, Fraps, von Müller, Grothe, & Öllinger, 2013;Friedlander & Fine, 2018;Kizilirmak, Galvao Gomes da Silva, Imamoglu, & Richardson-Klavehn, 2016;Thagard & Stewart, 2011). Therefore, the Aha-experience is a phenomenon associated with creativity (Friedman & Förster, 2005;Kounios et al, 2006), and potentially a subfield of creativity itself (Dietrich & Kanso, 2010).…”

“…In other words, the nature of Aha-experiences makes it rather difficult to observe in experimental settings. Several paradigms exist to elicit insight, like compound remote associate problems (Bowden & Jung-Beeman, 2003), magic tricks (Danek, Fraps, von Müller, Grothe, & Öllinger, 2014b;Hedne et al, 2016) and different kinds of puzzles (e.g., Friedlander & Fine, 2018;MacGregor & Cunningham, 2008;Weisberg, 1995). However, it is uncertain whether induced insights share a similar phenomenology to those found in an naturalistic setting (Klein & Jarosz, 2011).…”

Normative Data for 84 UK English Rebus Puzzles

“…The difficulty of rebus puzzles may arise, in part, from there being many ways in which they can be tackled (cf. Salvi et al, 2015), but may also be a consequence of the problem information initially misdirecting solution efforts because the solver draws upon implicit assumptions derived from the experience of normal reading (Friedlander and Fine, 2018, similarly suggest that normal reading may engender misdirection when solving cryptic crossword clues). Such self-imposed constraints may lead solvers to reach a point of impasse , where solution progress is not forthcoming, with such impasse needing to be circumvented by problem restructuring (see MacGregor and Cunningham, 2008; Cunningham et al, 2009).…”

Catch that word: interactivity, serendipity and verbal fluency in a word production task

“…We assessed participants along this dimension using the extraversion elements from a revised version of the same scale (the HEXACO-PI-R; Lee & Ashton, 2018). We also profiled the participants on the openness to experience elements of the same scale given the suggestion that this personality trait is related to the processing of irrelevant information (Agnoli et al, 2015;Friedlander & Fine, 2018).…”