Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigated the possibility that judgment about the goodness of ideas in insight problem solving is influencedby the solvers affect. In each trial of the remote associates tasks, participants were asked to judge whether or not the targetword was the solution. Immediately before the presentation of the target word, a positively or negatively valenced picturewas presented for a short period of time. Results showed that the presentation of positive pictures facilitated the correctresponse towards a solution word and interrupted the correct rejection of a non-solution one. The presentation of negativepictures had the opposite effect. Notably, participants did not notice the influence of the valenced pictures. These resultsindicate that implicit affective feelings can play a crucial role in the search for a solution and may sometimes lead solversto the false acceptance of non-solution.