The popular iconography of insight casts a thinker as he or she uncoils from a Rodin pose and a bulb that lights a world hitherto
hidden. By and large, these features of folk mythology capture and guide how psychologists conduct research on insight: Mental
processes — some of which may be unconscious — transform an inceptive abstract representation of the world until it prescribes a
fruitful solution to a problem. Yet thinking and problem solving outside the laboratory involve interacting with external
resources, and through this interactivity with a material world, solutions are distilled. Still, laboratory work on problem
solving pays scant and largely indifferent attention to interactivity: Sometimes problems are presented as riddles or static
graphical or diagrammatic images, or sometimes they are accompanied by artefacts that can be manipulated (and sometimes
interactivity is possible for some problems but not others within a set of problems over which performance is indiscriminately
amalgamated). The research methodology — and indifference to the central role of interactivity in thinking — follows from a
deep-seated commitment to mentalism and methodological individualism. However, a thinker is an embodied creature embedded in a
physical world: The materiality of external resources and artefacts through which problems manifest themselves inevitably
determines a set of action affordances. From a systemic perspective, thinking is traceable along a contingent spatio-temporal
itinerary wrought by interactivity and evidenced by changes in the world.
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Currie, Adrian & Anton Killin
2019. From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology. Mind & Language 34:2 ► pp. 263 ff.
2017. Cognition Beyond the Classical Information Processing Model: Cognitive Interactivity and the Systemic Thinking Model (SysTM). In Cognition Beyond the Brain, ► pp. 133 ff.
Vallée‐Tourangeau, Frédéric & Paul L. March
2020. Insight Out: Making Creativity Visible. The Journal of Creative Behavior 54:4 ► pp. 824 ff.
Valquaresma, Andreia & Joaquim Luís Coimbra
2021. Creativity, Learning and Technology: Lights and Insights for New Worldmaking Possibilities in Education. Creativity. Theories – Research - Applications 8:1 ► pp. 38 ff.
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