Incubation, insight, and creative problem solving: a unified theory and a connectionist model.

By Sébastien Hélie, Ron Sun. Psychology Review, 2010

376 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Investigating the structure of semantic networks in low and high creative persons (2014, background): “Recent reviews on creative thinking support this claim by emphasizing the retrieval of remote associations during creative problem solving (Helie and Sun, 2010).”
Incubation and creativity: Do something different (2013, methodology): “Activation spreading through a semantic network could serve to produce such novel associations (Helie & Sun, 2010; Jung-Beeman et al., 2004).”
Musical creativity and the embodied mind (2018, background): “In addition to the four processes discussed by Wallas (1926; see also Wertheimer, 1945), Hélie and Sun (2010) include creative problem-solving processes that entail the interaction of implicit and explicit forms of knowledge.”
Creative Thought as Blind Variation and Selective Retention: Why Creativity is Inversely Related to Sightedness (2013, neutral): “Lastly, if pi 0, then the idea xi is not immediately accessible, but can presumably be evoked after an incubation period requiring a suitable priming stimulus or stimuli (Hélie & Ron, 2010; Seifert, Meyer, Davidson, Patalano, & Yaniv, 1995).”