INSIGHT OUT 1 Insight Out: Making Creativity Visible Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau Kingston University and Paul March University of Oxford Author Note Address correspondence to either Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, Department of Psychology, Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, UNITED KINGDOM, KT1 2EE,
[email protected] or Paul March, Keble College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM, OX1 3PG,
[email protected]. We thank Wendy Ross, Gaëlle Vallée-Tourangeau and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on a previous version of this manuscript. INSIGHT OUT 2 Abstract Models of creative problem solving are predicated upon mental states to explain everything from the outcome of problem-solving experiments to the emergence of artistic creativity. We present two converging perspectives that describe a profoundly different ontological description of creativity. Our analysis proceeds from a distinction between first- order problem solving, where the agent interacts with a physical model of the problem and second-order problem solving, where the agent must cogitate a solution to a problem that is presented as a verbal description of a state of the world but where the agent does not or cannot transform physical elements of a problem. We acknowledge the recent evidence that foregrounds the importance of working memory in problem solving, including insight problem solving. However, we stress that the impressive psychometric success is obtained with a methodology that only measures second-order problem solving; we question whether first-order problem solving is equally well predicted by measures of cognitive or dispositional capacities. We propose that if mental simulation is replaced by the opportunity to engage with a physical model of a problem then the environment can provide affordances that help the participant to solve problems.