Surprise!—Clarifying the link between insight and prediction error

Abstract

AbstractThe AHA experience, a moment of deep understanding during insightful problem-solving involving feelings of certainty, pleasure, and surprise, has captivated psychologists for more than a century. Recently, a new theoretical framework has proposed a link between the AHA experience and prediction error (PE), a popular concept in decision-making and reinforcement learning. This framework suggests that participants maintain a meta-cognitive prediction about the time it takes to solve a problem and the AHA experience arises when the problem is solved earlier than expected, resulting in a meta-cognitive PE. In our preregistered online study, we delved deeper into this idea, investigating whether prediction errors also pertain to participants’ predictions regarding the solvability of the problem itself, and which dimension of the AHA experience aligns with the meta-cognitive PE. Utilizing verbal insight problems, we found a positive association between the AHA experience and the meta-cognitive PE, specifically in regards to problem solvability. Specifically, the element of surprise, a critical AHA dimension, emerged as a key indicator of the meta-cognitive PE, while other dimensions—such as pleasure, certainty, and suddenness—showed no signs for similar relationships, with suddenness exhibiting a negative correlation with meta-cognitive PE. This new finding provides further evidence that aspects of the AHA experience, surprise in particular, correspond to a meta-cognitive PE. The finding also underscores the multifaceted nature of this phenomenon, linking insights with learning theories and enhancing our understanding of this intriguing phenomenon.