Melissa Ferguson

 

Melissa J. Ferguson
Associate Professor, Psychology
Cornell University, United States

Melissa Ferguson received her PhD in social psychology from New York University in 2002.  She then moved to Cornell University, where she is currently an associate professor in the psychology department.  Her research is social-cognitive in its approach, which means she uses and refers to theories and methods from both social and cognitive psychology.   Her interests include the implicit activation and operation of attitudes, goal pursuit and motivation, ideology, and decision making.  Her work has appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Trends in Cognitive Science, Personality and Social Psychological Bulletin, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the BiNational Science Foundation.

Baruch Eitam
Post Doctorate Researcher, Psychology
Columbia University, United States

Baruch Eitam received his PhD in psychology (Cum Laude) from the Hebrew University in 2009.  He then moved to the United States where he is currently a post doctorate researcher at the psychology departments at Cornell and Columbia Universities.  His research is social-cognitive in its approach, which means he uses and refers to theories and methods from both social and cognitive psychology. His interests include the interaction between goal pursuit, motivation and learning, selective attention, and the functional role of implicit attitudes.  His work has appeared in Psychological Science and in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.  His research has been supported by the McClelland Center for Research and Innovation.

When Archimedes and King Solomon Meet: Wisdom as Intuitive Problem Solving
This research addresses the important similarities between wisdom and the process of insight. Both wisdom and insight arguably depend on intuitive (i.e., implicit) problem solving. The current work identifies the mechanics of such an implicit problem solving process by testing the underlying principles of accessibility and implicit value. Specifically, the more accessible and implicitly positive a concept is while a person reasons about a related insight problem, the more likely the person should generate that concept as a solution to the problem. Four experiments test these hypotheses. In the first two experiments, accessibility and implicit positivity will be measured (Experiment 1) or manipulated (Experiment 2), and then regressed onto performance on an intuitive problem solving task (a version of the Remote Associates Task; Mednick, 1962). The next two experiments will use these two principles of accessibility and implicit positivity to examine the related phenomena of incubation (Experiment 3) and nonconscious thought (Experiment 4). The predicted findings would together suggest that the two principles of accessibility and implicit positivity are valid markers of intuitive problem solving performance, and of nonconscious thought processes more generally. More broadly, these findings would reveal the benefits of conceptualizing wisdom as intuitive problem solving.

Thus far, Ferguson has conducted a large-scale pilot study in which normative data were collected on the difficulty of solving a large set of intuition problems.  These intuition problems were taken from the Remote Associates Test (RAT), and each one required the respondent to generate a solution word that is related to each of three other clues (all of which are unrelated to each other).  These problems require flexible and intuitive thought, and have been traditionally used as a measure of intuitive problem solving.

In the next experiment, the central hypothesis was that the accessibility and positivity of solutions to RAT items, as measured implicitly after a brief (3 sec) initial attempt to solve them, will jointly predict whether participants generate these solutions in a second opportunity to solve the problems. This study generated the surprising finding that the accessibility of the solutions as measured in a lexical decision task was positively related to solving the RAT items in the second attempt. In light of this finding, two additional experiments have been conducted to test the stability of this surprising result.  These experiments were modified according to the conclusions from Experiment 1. The data collection is now complete and data analysis is currently underway.

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