Don’t wait to incubate: immediate 15 versus delayed incubation in divergent thinking (2012)

Creative problems are generally defined as problems that require the production of new approaches and solutions, where by “new” we mean novel to the solver (Boden, 2004). Explaining how such personally novel solutions are reached is still a major challenge for the psychology of thinking. In analyses of creative problem solving, it has often been claimed that setting creative problems aside for a while can lead to novel ideas about the solution, either spontaneously while attending to other matters or very rapidly when the previously intractable problem is revisited. Personal accounts by eminent creative thinkers in a range of domains have attested to this phenomenon (eg, Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Ghiselin, 1952; Poincaré, 1913). In his well-known four-stage analysis of creative problem solving, Wallas (1926, p. 80) labeled a stage at which the problem is set aside and not consciously addressed as “incubation,” and this stage is the focus of the present study. Following Wallas (1926), a substantial body of experimental research on incubation effects has accumulated using both insight problems–to which there is a single solution, but the solver has to develop a new way of representing or structuring the task in order to reach that solution–and divergent problems–to which there is no single correct solution, but the solution process encourages seeking as many novel and useful ideas as possible. The prototypical divergent task, which was the one used in the present study, is the alternative-uses task, in which participants are asked to generate as many uses as possible that are different from the normal uses of one or more familiar objects, such as a …