View article

A temporal contiguity hypothesis for the experience of veracity is tested which states that a solution candidate to a cognitive problem is more likely to be experienced as correct the faster it succeeds the problem. Experiment 1 varied the onset time of the appearance of proposed solutions to anagrams (50ms vs. 150ms) and found for both correct and incorrect candidates that faster appearing solutions were more frequently judged as being correct, although participants were not aware of the difference in onset delay. Experiment 2 replicated this effect with mathematical equations, shorter onset latencies (0ms vs. 50ms), and a reversed sequence (presenting first the solution and then the problem). Experiment 3 showed that the probability of judging a word as the solution of a remote associate insight problem decreases linearly with increasing onset delay (50ms, 150ms, 300ms). Possible neurobiological-cognitive …