Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.