Magic tricks usually remain a mystery to the observer. For the sake of science, we offered participants the opportunity to discover the magician's secret method by repeatedly presenting the same trick and asking them to find out how the trick worked. In the context of insightful problem solving, the present work investigated the emotions that participants experience upon solving a magic trick. ...

Research into creative insight has had a strong emphasis on the psychological processes underlying problem-solving situations as a standard model for the empirical study of this phenomenon. Although this model has produced significant advances in our scientific understanding of the nature of insight, we believe that a full comprehension of insight requires complementing cognitive and neuroscien...

Rebus puzzles and compound remote associate problems have been successfully used to study problem solving. These problems are physically compact, often can be solved within short time limits, and have unambiguous solutions, and English versions have been normed for solving rates and levels of difficulty. Many studies on problem solving with sudden insight have taken advantage of these features ...

The feeling of insight in problem solving is typically associated with the sudden realization of a solution that appears obviously correct (Kounios et al., 2006). Salvi et al. (2016) found that a solution accompanied with sudden insight is more likely to be correct than a problem solved through conscious and incremental steps. However, Metcalfe (1986) indicated that participants would often pre...

In recent years, vibrant research has developed on "consolidation" during sleep: To what extent are newly experienced impressions reprocessed or even restructured during sleep? We used the number reduction task (NRT) to study if and how sleep does not only reiterate new experiences but may even lead to new insights. In the NRT, covert regularities may speed responses. This implicit acquisition ...

Fiona is a tool that has been designed to check behavioral correctness of a service and to analyze the interaction of services in service oriented architectures, for instance. It implements very efficient data structures and algorithms, which have partly been adapted from LoLA. Fiona has been proven to be applicable in practice by service designers, service publishers, and service brokers. This...

The goal of this work is to arm designers with the necessary insight in the nonlinear behavior of their designs such that they can take the different specifications that are put on the nonlinear behavior correctly into account at every level of their design. The contributions of this work make it possible to achieve this goal. It covers the design at transistor level, the analysis of complete c...

The human-computer interaction community is an umbrella for many disciplines. Conflicts occur from time to time, in particular between scientists and designers. This article compares the quality criteria used in design with those used in science, in order to gain insight into what design can contribute to the development of science. From the scientific perspective, the weakest point of design k...