Children undergo a formidable conceptual development in early childhood and are known to be curious and active learners. While much of children’s conceptual learning involves the gradual construction of knowledge, occasionally they may make a leap; they may have an aha-experience. How do such leaps in understanding influence the child’s subsequent learning? We know from research with adults that aha-experiences can benefit learning, by facilitating increased motivation (Liljedahl, 2005; Skaar & Reber, 2020, 2021) and more accurate memory (Danek et al., 2013; Kizilirmak et al., 2016). We also know that children have aha-experiences from an early age (Haugen et al., in press; Marchant et al., 2022; B. Sobel, 1939). Yet, to date, very little systematic research has investigated children’s aha-experiences. The overarching aim of this dissertation is to build a foundation for research on aha moments in childhood. It provides theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions to the study of children’s aha-experiences.
The theoretical contribution of the current project consists of both the first paper and this dissertation. Paper 1 is a theoretical book chapter which provides a review of the cognitive psychology of aha moments and places aha moments in a wider developmental context. The chapter discusses momentary changes in cognition and affect which make up an aha moment, and more long-term changes in motivation and development that may follow an aha moment. In this dissertation, the section Theoretical Background picks up the thread from the book chapter and elaborates in more detail on how children’s aha-experiences may be related to their overarching cognitive and metacognitive development. Children’s aha-experiences are conceptualized as metacognitive experiences that accompany and guide children’s conceptual development from early childhood.
The empirical contribution of the current project provides the initial data on how children experience and understand aha moments. Two empirical studies are reported in Paper 2 and Paper 3. The first study investigates children’s understanding of the affective valence of aha-experiences. Children aged 4 to 8 years old (N = 123) were presented with problem-solving scenarios and asked how the character in the story was feeling. We found that in all age groups, children understood that having an aha-experience was associated with positive affect. However, there were age-related differences in children’s affect judgements when a problem was solved through trial and error. The 4-year-olds expected a story character to feel less sad after a series of failed solution attempts, compared with the older age groups. To follow up the tentative finding that children understand the affective valence associated with aha-experiences, the second study assessed children’s understanding of aha-experiences beyond affective valence.
The second empirical study investigated children’s experiences and understanding of aha moments. Children aged 4 to 8 years old (N = 160) solved a picture clues task designed to elicit aha-experiences as well as a broad set of tasks that assessed their understanding of aha-experiences. Our results indicate that there is a developmental lag between the occurrence of aha-experiences and children’s understanding of aha-experiences. Based on experimenter observation, children had the same number of aha-experiences on the picture clues task in all age groups. However, understanding of aha-experiences improved with age. With age, there were improvements in children’s ability to self-report their own aha-experiences, to distinguish between scenarios where a story character did or did not have an aha-experience, and to correctly identify statements that describe a typical aha-experience. The second study also provided tentative evidence that children’s aha-experiences, like those of adults, are associated with motivation and solution accuracy. Higher numbers of observed aha-experiences were associated with increased motivation to continue working on a similar task rather than switching to something new, and trials with observed aha-experiences had higher accuracy compared to trials without observed aha.
The methodological contribution of the current dissertation consists of several new tasks suitable for children in the age-range 4 to 8 years old. First, a visual remote associate task was developed to elicit children’s aha-experiences in an experimental setting. Second, a range of new tasks were developed to assess children’s understanding of aha-experiences. The tasks have been made accessible on the Open Science Framework and can be used in future research on children’s aha-experiences.
Many new lines of research can be drawn from the current work, with implications for education, for the cognitive science of insight, and for developmental research on metacognition and emotion understanding. The current work encourages educators to consider how metacognitive experiences shape students’ progress and motivation. When it comes to the cognitive psychology of insight, gaining a better understanding of how aha-experiences develop can advance the field by broadening the scope of the field and drawing on methods and knowledge from developmental science. In developmental research, the aha-experience forms an interesting case of how metacognitive experiences influence cognitive development, and how children develop an understanding of their own thoughts and feelings. As for the development of emotion understanding, the close connections between a cognitive shift in understanding and the characteristic affective profile of the aha-experience can provide new knowledge about how children develop an explicit understanding of the relationship between thoughts and feelings.