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The Nature of Insight Edited by Robert J. Sternberg & Janet E Davidson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Cloth. 618 p. $45.
Robert Sternberg, professor of psychology and education at Yale University, and Janet Davidson, who teaches psychology at Lewis and Clark College, together with 28 other experts, present in an Introduction, 16 chapters, and an Epilogue, a synopsis of what is presently known about the mutlifaceted, yet little understood, phenomenon referred to as "insight." After Janet Metcalfe's Foreword and the editors' Preface, the volume consists of five parts: Introduction, the Puzzle-Problem Approach, the Invention-Based Approach, the Great-Minds Approach, and the Metaphors-of-Mind Approach. In the Epilogue, a summary together with conclusions, two usages of insight are pointed out: (1) a "state of understanding," as a more diffuse concept whose dimensions are not yet agreed upon; and (2) a "sudden emergence of an idea into conscious awareness," defined as a transitional event, more easily dealt with as a coherent construct, featuring several causes, but not yet an agreed-upon mechanism (p. 560).
In Chapter 1, Richard Mayer provides a historical overview, mainly on twentieth-century attempts to explain insight as an event, encouraged in particular by Gestalt psychology, understood as: completing a schema, reorganizing visual information, reformulating a problem, overcoming a mental block, and finding a problem analog. Roger Dominowski and Pamela Dallob discuss in Chapter 2 the relation between insight and problem-solving, including stumbling blocks. In Chapter 3, Colleen Seifert and colleagues review insight events from three perspectives: business as usual, wizard Merlin, and prepared mind/incubation phase. They propose their own, empirically-based stage model of initial impasse, stored failure indices, and subsequent opportunistic assimilaton. Chapter...