Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or…

A new paradigm is presented for investigating how intervening concepts are learned. Results of four experiments involving 85 college students provide converging evidence for the acquisition of intervening concepts. A simple associative learning mechanism is proposed to account for the results. The new paradigm uses a stimulus-response-feedback…

Previous research on analogy solutions indicated that an associative relatedness process was central to the solution process. One implication of these findings was that differences in associations to the words comprising the items may produce differences in test performance and, hence, account for the vast differentials in performance of persons…