Young children’s understanding and experience of insight

Prenevost, Mathilde H. and Nilsen, Ida B. R. and Bølstad, Evalill and Pons, Francisco and Harris, Paul L. and Reber, Rolf (2024) Young children’s understanding and experience of insight. Developmental Psychology. ISSN 0012-1649

Abstract

An insight is a moment of sudden understanding followed by characteristic feelings of suddenness, positive affect, certainty, and ease, commonly known as an aha experience. Despite evidence from studies with adults that aha experiences benefit learning, little systematic research on children’s aha experiences exists. The present study asks how children understand and experience insight. We presented a community sample of 160 children (age: 4–8 years, 47% girls, 51% boys, 2% nonbinary) with an illustrated clues task inspired by the Remote Associate Test, a task commonly used to study insight in adults. In this task, children saw three clues and were asked to find a solution word that was associated with the three clues. Self-reported and observed aha experiences were recorded, along with children’s solution accuracy and confidence. Children also answered a set of questions to assess their understanding of aha experiences. We found that although the number of aha experiences remained stable across age, there was a clear developmental increase in the understanding of aha experiences. Children’s ability to recognize their own aha experiences as well as their general understanding of the aha concept increased with age. This suggests a lag between the occurrence of children’s aha experiences and their understanding of such experiences; children first have aha experiences and later develop an understanding of those experiences. Aha experiences were associated with higher accuracy, but not with higher confidence ratings. Observed aha experiences, but not self-reported aha experiences, predicted increased motivation. Our findings are in line with the literature on metacognitive development and the distinction between the experience and the understanding of emotion.