Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study examined the differences among individuals in theperformance of insight problem solving. The problem-solvingcharacteristics of an individual seemed to be dependent onwhat and how they had learned. Thus, we compared theperformances of insight problem solving betweenreinforcement and supervised learners. The results showed thatthe performances of reinforcement learners were better thanthose of supervised learners, although the non-insight problemsolving performance of both learner types was comparable.This result suggests that insight might be supported by thecognitive mechanisms underlying reinforcement learning. Inparticular, we speculate that the degree of exploration, bywhich reinforcement learning is characterized, might have animpact on the performance of insight problem solving