Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of addressee of verbalization, self or other, on insight problem solving. Thirty-five participants were assigned to one of the three conditions: toward-self verbalization, toward-other verbalization, or irrelevant verbalization (control). A 3-minute verbalization phase was inserted after 5 minutes of solving the T-puzzle. The participants were asked to write down their thoughts during the first 5 minutes as a record in the toward- self verbalization condition, and as an instruction for other participants in the toward-other verbalization condition. The participants in the control condition were required to write down their concerns. After that, they were asked to engage in the puzzle again for 10 minutes. The results showed a detrimental verbalization effect while allowed a wide range of effects for the self vs other distinction going in either direction. We are using this study as a basis for a pre-registered repo