The role of anticipatory attention in insight and non-insight solutions in the anagram solution task

Background. In modern psychology the study of mechanisms of creative thinking is of great interest. Attention is one of the important factors affecting the operation of intuitive thinking component. The Objective of the paper is to study the effect of anticipatory attention on the insight and analytical frequency in solving anagrams. Design. During the experiment, the participants performed two successive tasks. The first task included stimuli identification when the subjects were presented with stimuli — anagrams and pseudowords. The task was to identify the anagram correctly. In the second task (if the stimulus had been the anagram), the participants had to solve the anagram, noting whether the solution was analytical or an insight. The anagram and pseudoword had different letter order. The participants were divided into two groups: the experimental group whose subjects were informed about the difference and were asked to use it for a lexical solution and the control group whose subjects were not informed about the difference. It was expected that the identification of the anagram in the first task will shape anticipatory attention patterns for the experimental group, which will affect the frequency of insight solutions in the second task. Results. The subjects of the experimental group were found to have a correlation relationship between the speed characteristics of the first and second tasks for analytical solutions. For insight solutions, no such connection was found. Conclusion. The results demonstrate that insights and analytical solutions are the result of two separate processes of finding solutions that proceed in parallel

Brain Activations and Functional Connectivity Patterns Associated with Insight-Based and Analytical Anagram Solving

Insight is one of the most mysterious problem-solving phenomena involving the sudden emergence of a solution, often preceded by long unproductive attempts to find it. This seemingly unexplainable generation of the answer, together with the role attributed to insight in the advancement of science, technology and culture, stimulate active research interest in discovering its neuronal underpinnings. The present study employs functional Magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to probe and compare the brain activations occurring in the course of solving anagrams by insight or analytically, as judged by the subjects. A number of regions were activated in both strategies, including the left premotor cortex, left claustrum, and bilateral clusters in the precuneus and middle temporal gyrus. The activated areas span the majority of the clusters reported in a recent meta-analysis of insight-related fMRI studies. At the same time, the activation patterns were very similar between the insight and analytical solutions, with the only difference in the right sensorimotor region probably explainable by subject motion related to the study design. Additionally, we applied resting-state fMRI to study functional connectivity patterns correlated with the individual frequency of insight anagram solutions. Significant correlations were found for the seed-based connectivity of areas in the left premotor cortex, left claustrum, and left frontal eye field. The results stress the need for optimizing insight paradigms with respect to the accuracy and reliability of the subjective insight/analytical solution classification. Furthermore, the short-lived nature of the insight phenomenon makes it difficult to capture the associated neural events with the current experimental techniques and motivates complementing such studies by the investigation of the structural and functional brain features related to the individual differences in the frequency of insight-based decisions