ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines four main approaches on incubation effects. The intermittent conscious work theory is a part of incubation group. The chapter supports the unconscious work hypothesis, since the dissimilar activities produced significantly better performances in the number of responses and patterns and level of creativity of these responses and patterns over both the alternative uses task and the mental synthesis task. Unconscious work hypothesis is that incubation effects occur through the active unconscious processing of a task. Dijksterhuis and Meurs developed an Immediate Incubation paradigm, in which the incubation period of interpolated activity takes place immediately after the main task instructions. The verbal interpolated activity involved a series of 63 five letter anagrams, while the spatial interpolated activity involved a series of 24 mental rotations. The effects of the similarity relationship between target and interpolated tasks are relevant because the three main competing hypotheses for incubation, beneficial forgetting, attentional withdrawal, and unconscious work suggest three different effects.
