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Cited by 258

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A "Small-World" Network Model of Cognitive Insight

Open access
Schilling, Melissa A.·2005·Creativity Research Journal

Abstract

Despite many decades of study, scientists still puzzle over the process of insight. By what mechanism does a person experience that "Aha!" moment, when sudden clarity emerges from a tangled web of thoughts and ideas? This research integrates psychological work on insight with graph theoretic work on "small-world" phenomenon, to construct a theory that explains how insight occurs, how it is similar to and different from more typical learning processes, and why it yields an affective response in the individual. I propose that cognitive insight occurs when an atypical association, forged through random recombination or directed search, results in a "shortcut" in an individual's network of representations. This causes a rapid decrease in path length, reorients the individual's understanding of the relationships within and among the affected representations, and can prompt a cascade of other connections. This result is demonstrated by applying graph theoretical analysis to network translations of commonly used insight problems.

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Metadata

Authors
Schilling, M. A.
Venue
Creativity Research Journal
Published
2005-07
Volume
17
Issue
2-3
Pages
131-154
ISSN
  • 1040-0419 (ISSN-L)
  • 1532-6934
OpenAlex
W2145879540
Cited by
258
References
9
FWCI
3.33
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A "Small-World" Network Model of Cognitive Insight. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1080/10400419.2005.9651475
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Schilling, M. A. (2005). A "Small-World" Network Model of Cognitive Insight. Creativity Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2005.9651475

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.