“The Penny Drops”
by Kathryn Friedlander and Philip Fine
Philip Fine and I have just published a second article on cryptic crosswords – this time on the ‘PDM’, and how cryptics might help us, as psychologists, to understand the processes behind insight moments. The link is here and the article is free to read on-line or to download as a pdf.
The article outlines current psychological knowledge about the Aha! moment, and then takes a tour through various types of crossword clue to explain how insight is triggered in each case. There are also some more results from the crossword survey which many of you took part in, and a chance to see how advanced cryptics fit into the picture (thanks to the generous support of the Magpie crossword team, whose grids we feature).
Please do take a look and feed back any comments – either here, or to my Buckingham address given in the paper.
You can catch up on the research carried out by Kathryn and Philip by selecting the “University of Buckingham” category below.
Thank you. This sounds interesting and I will enjoy reading it.
Just want to alert BDers to the brilliant pdm shared by Blaise here.
An interesting thesis, albeit, like all academic papers these days, a difficult read due to clutter of citations better put in foot/end notes. Not sure I agree that conclusions necessarily follow from evidence, but a good start point for further research.
Welcome to the blog Martin