The starting intuition is that there is such a thing as an emotional feedback when a something is "grasped", as opposed to merely articulated in, or presented to, the mind. If so, what is the cue for triggering that feeling? One might propose that it is the ability to symbolically process/link the new information in terms of an older, more familiar, structure. Alternatively, it could be triggered by cues internal to the information itself (e.g. logical entailing). I would go for the former, as it would be "cheaper" for the brain to perform. Any guidance on "prior art" on all of this?
Maybe grasping is the detection of a
rule such that certain propositions
learned previously can be abandonned
(don't have to be repeatedly relearned)
because these propositions can be
derived from the new rule. The award
circuitry of the brain might be
involved. Keywords for search are
heureka, aha-moments.
http://phys.org/news/2011-03-insight-aha-memories.html
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99544&page=1
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/cp-ene050710.php
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0001459
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020097
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080123102413.htm
Regards,
Joachim
I would look into FOK (Feeling Of Knowing). It is the first level of metacognition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamemory#Feeling_of_knowing_judgments
You can follow the references in the section on feeling of knowing.
In general I would say that you are looking at metacognition itself. The first level is awareness of your own thoughts, the second is awareness of someone else's thoughts, and the third is awareness of someone else's awareness of thoughts. Yeah, it sounds a bit esoteric at that point, but a lot of cognitive research has been done on primates in exactly this field, both behaviourally and neuroscientifically:
http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(12)00524-7
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognition-animal/
This is very useful, thank you both for the thoughtful suggestions.
Regards,
Adrian
Maybe your are also interested in the "A-ha" or insight phenomenon. Then I recommend this articles as a starter.
Bowden, E. M., & Beeman, M. J. (1998). Getting the right idea: Semantic activation in the right hemisphere may help solve insight problems. Psychological Science, 9(6), 435-440. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00082
Bowden, E. M., & Jung-Beeman, M. (2003). Aha! Insight experience correlates with solution activation in the right hemisphere. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10(3), 730-737. doi: 10.3758/BF03196539
Bowden, E. M., Jung-Beeman, M., Fleck, J., & Kounios, J. (2005). New approaches to demystifying insight. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(7), 322-328. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2005.05.012
Jung-Beeman, M., Bowden, E. M., Haberman, J., Frymiare, J. L., Arambel-Liu, S., Greenblatt, R., . . . Kounios, J. (2004). Neural activity when people solve verbal problems with insight. PLoS biology, 2(4), e97.
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