Varying goals and approaches of innovation centers in academic health systems: a semistructured qualitative study.

Purpose: The medical community has seen a high level of interest in innovation over recent years. In response, health systems and medical centers have established innovation offices or centers, but their processes and practices for fostering innovation are not well understood. This information could help leaders in the medical community discern and develop criteria for assessing the tools and approaches most effective in fostering innovation.

Working memory and insight in verbal problems: analysis of compound remote associates.

Problem solving is sometimes accompanied by a sudden feeling of knowing, or insight. The specific cognitive processes that underlie insightful problem solving are a matter of great interest and debate. Although some investigators favor a special-process view, which explains insight in terms of specialized mechanisms that operate outside of conscious awareness, others favor a business-as-usual account, which posits that insightful problem solving involves the same conscious mechanisms-including working memory (WM) and attention-that are implicated in noninsightful problem solving.

Working memory and insight in the nine-dot problem.

In the present article, we examine the contribution of working memory (WM) to solution of the nine-dot problem, a classic insight problem. Prior research has generally demonstrated a limited role for WM in the solution of insight problems, which are typically assumed to be solved without conscious planning. However, MacGregor, Ormerod, and Chronicle (2001) proposed an information-processing model that solves the nine-dot problem by relying on a visual WM mechanism, which they term lookahead.

Following the wrong footsteps: fixation effects of pictorial examples in a design problem-solving task.

Two experiments examined possible negative transfer in nonexperts from the use of pictorial examples in a laboratory design problem-solving situation. In Experiment 1, 89 participants were instructed to "think aloud" and were assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: (a) control (standard instructions), (b) fixation (inclusion of a problematic example, describing its problematic elements), or (c) defixation (inclusion of a problematic example, with instructions to avoid using problematic elements). Negative transfer due to examples was measured both quantitatively and qualitatively through verbal protocols.

The use of verbal protocols as data: an analysis of insight in the candle problem.

In the present study, we examined the use of verbal protocols as data in the study of the cognitive processes underlying insight. Fifty-eight Temple University undergraduates attempted to solve Duncker's (1945) candle problem either silently or while thinking aloud. Solution rates, solving times, and solution types were comparable between conditions, suggesting that verbal overshadowing (Schooler, Ohlsson, & Brooks, 1993) did not occur when the participants attempted to solve the candle problem.