ABSTRACT
Following the previous chapter on the role of long-term memory for solving problems by insight, the current chapter focuses on the role of insight problem-solving for long-term memory formation. Insight in problem-solving has long been assumed to facilitate memory formation for the problem and its solution. Here, we discuss cognitive, affective, and neurocognitive candidate mechanisms that may underlie learning in insight problem-solving. We conclude that insight appears to combine several beneficial effects that each on their own have been found to facilitate long-term memory formation: the generation effect, subjective importance of the discovery of the solution, intrinsic reward, schema congruence, and level of processing. A distributed set of brain regions is identified as being associated with these processes. On the one hand, the more affective response related to pleasure, surprise, and novelty detection is linked to amygdala, ventral striatum, and dopaminergic midbrain activity, supporting an important role of reward learning. On the other hand, insight as completing a schema is associated with prior knowledge-dependent and medial prefrontal cortex-mediated memory formation. Thus, learning by insight may reflect a fast route to cortical memory representations. However, many open questions remain, which we explicitly point out during this review.
