Children’s Understanding and Experience of Insight

An insight is a moment of sudden understanding followed by characteristic feelings of suddenness, positive affect, certainty, and ease, commonly known as an aha-experience. Despite evidence from studies with adults that aha-experiences benefit learning, little systematic research on children’s aha-experiences exists. The current study asks how children understand and experience insight. We presented a community sample of 160 children (age: 4-8 years, 47% girls, 51% boys, 2 % non-binary) with an illustrated clues task inspired by the Remote Associate Test, a task commonly used to study insight in adults. In this task, children saw three clues and were asked to find a solution word that was associated with the three clues. Self-reported and observed aha-experiences were recorded, along with children’s solution accuracy and confidence. Children also answered a set of questions to assess their understanding of aha-experiences. We found that although the number of aha-experiences remained stable across age, there was a clear developmental increase in the understanding of aha-experiences. Children’s ability to recognize their own aha-experiences as well as their general understanding of the aha-concept increased with age. This suggests a lag between the occurrence of children’s aha-experiences and their understanding of such experiences; children first have aha-experiences and later develop an understanding of those experiences. Aha-experiences were associated with higher accuracy, but not with higher confidence ratings. Observed aha-experiences, but not self-reported aha-experiences, predicted increased motivation. Our findings are in line with the literature on metacognitive development, and the distinction between the experience and the understanding of emotion.