Cognition: Mental Representations, Problem Solving, and Decision Making - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 175

Fig. 6.9 Connect all the dots
with four line segments
without picking up your
pencil
models they have encountered (functional fixedness) and what previous strategies
they have used (Einstellung). Simply being aware that these effects can arise
means that you can design systems that avoid them.
Insight problems are problems where novel behavior or understanding is
required. Figure 6.9 shows a typical example. Most problem solvers have trouble
solving this problem the first time. Solving it requires a singular insight, in this
case, that you can and have to go outside the implied box the dots make up.
Similarly, the problem in Fig. 6.8 is often presented as an insight problem because
the way problem solving proceeds is that you are frustrated for a while until you
'see' the answer. While using Gimp to edit photos, for example, one of us has
solved several insight problems.
Insight problem solving can be seen as having several stages (Sternberg and
Davidson 1995 ):
Impasse: a point reached by an individual where they run out of ideas of operators
or strategies to try that might solve the problem.
Fixation: an individual repeats the same type of solution again and again, even
when they sees that it does not seem to lead to a solution; they become fixated on a
solution.
Incubation: a pause or gap between attempts to solve a problem can sometimes appear
to aid the finding of a solution, as if one is clearing one's mind of faulty ideas, or, as has
been found, cues in the environment can help suggest solutions (Kaplan 1989 ).
The 'Aha' experience: the solutions to some insight problems can seem to appear
from nowhere, like a Eureka moment.
Unless you are providing puzzles to your user as part of a game, you generally
do not want to provide them with insight problems. Insight problems are hard to
solve, are characterized by a relatively long solution time per number of steps, and