Phenomenology of visual one-shot learning: Affective and cognitive components of insight in morphed gradual change hidden figures

Author

Ishikawa, Tetsuo and Toshima, Mayumi and Mogi, Ken

Abstract

People sometimes gain insight into an innovative solution of problem. In the visual domain, one-shot learning in hidden figures is a prominent instance of such Eureka moments. However, the nature of conscious experience accompanying the visual one-shot learning has not been well studied. Here we show the phenomenology of visual one-shot learning scrutinized through an experiment considering more diverging aspects of subjective feelings. Correlation and exploratory factor analysis were performed on the participants’ recognition time, accuracy, and subjective judgments of hidden figure recognition in morphing gradual change paradigm. As a result, two salient factors were found, which were interpreted as “Aha!” experience and task difficulty. Furthermore, the “Aha!” experience consists of affective and cognitive components of insight. The results suggested that insight can be characterized by multidimensional factors in the case of visual one-shot learning as in common with other problem domains and modalities.