ABSTRACT
Creative problems are generally defi ned as problems that require the production of new approaches and solutions, where by “new” we mean novel to the solver (Boden, 2004). Explaining how such personally novel solutions are reached is still a major challenge for the psychology of thinking. In analyses of creative problem solving, it has often been claimed that setting creative problems aside for a while can lead to novel ideas about the solution, either spontaneously while attending to other matters or very rapidly when the previously intractable problem is revisited. Personal accounts by eminent creative thinkers in a range of domains have attested to this phenomenon (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Ghiselin, 1952; Poincaré, 1913). In his well-known four-stage analysis of creative problem solving, Wallas (1926, p. 80) labeled a stage at which the problem is set aside and not consciously addressed as “incubation,” and this stage is the focus of the present study.
