Research suggests the processes involved in analogical transfer are not unlike those of insightful problem solving. This study tests whether encoding cross-domain analogies leads to more feelings of insight and higher rates of far transfer. On each trial in the present study, subjects induced a conceptual relationship from a set of three verbal analogy pairs (30 trials). Half of the trials had a semantically distant (i.e. expansive) final pair, and half of the trials had a semantically close (i.e. consistent) final pair. Subsequently, subjects attempted to complete a novel far analogy for each of the previously learned relations. Far transfer performance on new analogies was predicted by the semantic vector distance of the originally encoded relation. Subjects also reported significantly stronger aha moments at the moment of transfer for accurate transfer responses compared to inaccurate responses, which suggests that the aha response may provide metacognitive information about solution accuracy.

The Aha! experience has mainly been studied in the context of insightful problem solving, but less work has investigatedAha! experiences that can occur during learning. In these studies, participants were asked to self-report Aha! momentswhen learning about principles in Biology, such as symbiosis or mimicry, from sets of three divergent examples. In theproblem-oriented condition, participants saw the examples and were asked to generate their common principle. In thedirect instruction condition, participants were told the principle directly. Participants were significantly more likely toreport Aha! moments in the problem-oriented condition. Although having an Aha! experience did not always lead tobetter learning, the likelihood of having an Aha! moment was positively correlated with several student characteristics,particularly in the problem-oriented condition. These studies offer another perspective on the potential benefits of learningfrom invention activities.