Abstract: Insight, a type of creative cognition in psychology, is pervasive in almost all kinds of domains ranging from technical innovations, artistic creations to scientific discoveries, which is a special way approaching a problem solution through a sequential reasoning by applying previous concepts or methods. In daily life, most people might have a peculiar and unexpected experience when the solution to a problem they struggled with was suddenly achieved. This phenomenological experience has been defined as insight experience and considered as definitive of an insightful solution or as the clearest defining characteristic of insight problem solving. As the best availably behavioral indicator of insight, insight experience has been widely used as a subjective criterion for distinguishing insightful from non-insightful solutions. A variety of examples concerning insight experience were documented in anecdotes of scientists and inventors, little is known about the processing properties, conceptual structure, and functional mechanisms of such experience itself. This work mainly focused on the above issues and attempted to categorize insight experience into two classes, one is the experience accompanying the occurrence of insight solutions or the so-called aha experience, and the other is the impasse-related subjective experience before successful restructuring during insight problem solving. Through the present review, we could find that the insight experience is both cognitive and emotional in processing characteristics, which has been widely validated by the emotion-like effect of such experience on subsequent cognitive task such as long-term memory and supported by the impasse-related facilitation on its following memory performance that is highly similar as the effect of deep-processing observed in previous literatures. Moreover, this work showed that the two-staged insight experience is not the one-dimensional construct but the multidimensional construct encompassed by more than two cognitive and emotional elements in meso-structure, such as happiness, exciting, surprise, easiness and certainty for the solution-related insight experience, and frustration, depression and disfluency for the impasse-related insight experience. In terms of psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the two-staged insight experience, evidence indicated that such experience could partly be explained by processing fluency and relates with neural circuits that are individually responsible for processing reward and emotion, such as the emotion-related amygdala or insula, and reward-related orbitofrontal cortex or striatum. This work has systematically reviewed empirical studies on insight experience and originally proposed the two-staged view of this experience. Future researches should further examine insight experience using more complementary methods from the perspective of “the transition from the old to the new”.

Key words: insight experience, aha reaction, mental impasse, creative insight

摘要： 顿悟体验是伴随顿悟问题解决过程的心理和现象学体验，主要包含伴随题解闪现的啊哈体验和因思维定势自动激活而催生的僵局阶段体验。现有研究显示，顿悟体验可能是多类认知与情绪要素构成，兼具认知和情绪加工特性的多维复合体。加工流畅性可部分解释顿悟体验的产生机制，杏仁核、眶额区和脑岛等情绪和奖赏加工的脑区则可能是其脑功能基础。未来须用多元方法从新旧交替视角深化两阶段顿悟体验的研究。

关键词: 顿悟体验, 啊哈反应, 思维僵局, 创造性顿悟