We’re beginning to understand how kids see ‘aha!’ moments

Sometimes, when we're struggling to solve a problem, we get lucky enough to be struck with a sudden burst of insight: a lightbulb-over-the-head 'aha!' moment. These can happen with a wide array of challenges — be they in personal, creative, or professional endeavours — and often come with warm feelings, a sense of motivation, and enhanced understanding of the issue.

While most of us have an intuitive sense of what these moments feel like as an adult, the way that children understand and experience aha moments has only recently become the subject of research interest. This subject is the focus of a new study published by Josefine Haugen and colleagues from the universities of Oslo and Lancaster, which finds that not only do children associate aha experiences with positive emotions, but that as they grow and develop, so too do their ideas about flashes of insight.

In the first study, 123 children aged between 4 and 8 were presented with a series of problem-solving stories. Each featured a character facing a challenge, resolved either through sudden insight or trial-and-error, with successful or unsuccessful outcomes. The children rated the character's emotions from very sad to very happy at four different time points: after the introduction, at the moment of impasse, at the insight or moment of effort, and after the outcome.

There were no age differences in how different aged kids rated emotions associated with successfully solving problems. Surprisingly, however, there were also no differences in how different age groups assessed the emotions associated with moments of insight. While this might suggest that younger children have a better understanding of insights than we think, the authors propose two possible answers.

First, if (as recent research hints at) insights are common in childhood, then maybe even the youngest children in this study already knew they're associated with positive emotions. The team's alternative hypothesis, however, is that perhaps those younger children didn't recognise that an insight had taken place, and saw the problem as already solved — the positive emotions associated with successfully solving the problem then 'leaking' backwards into their assessment of how moments of insight feel.

To answer this question of whether younger children thought the problem was already solved, the next study tested whether children understand that aha moments are linked to generating ideas, and whether they attribute them to mental or external triggers. To do this, 167 children aged 3 to 9 were shown an illustration of a character experiencing an aha moment and then heard two different stories explaining what might have caused it. One involved the character coming up with a new idea to solve a problem, while the other involved continuing an unsuccessful method. Children were asked to choose which story best explained the character's reaction.

If they chose the new idea, they were asked a follow up question: did the character say "aha" because they suddenly had the idea, or because they expected it would solve the problem? In one scenario, for example, children were asked whether the character had said "aha" because he was going to successfully reach a teddy placed on a high shelf, or because he suddenly got an idea of how to do so.

Again, the results found that children as young as 4 understand that aha moments are linked to new ideas, with older children more easily able to comprehend this connection. When asked why the character said aha, however, a different pattern emerged: 4-year-olds tended to believe the character said "aha" because the problem would be solved, while children aged 5 and 6 were divided. Only from age 7 did children reliably attribute aha experience to the mental process of having the idea itself.

This suggests that while young children recognise insight as part of problem-solving, only older children understand that the feelings that come with an aha moment are triggered by the thought itself, not just by anticipating a solution. These findings, the team say, are in line with other age-related developments: younger children understand that others have thoughts, for example, but the ability to fully comprehend others' minds improves as they get older.

These findings add to our overall understanding of this previously little-studied topic, and reinforces the idea that children have ideas about aha moments, even at surprisingly young ages. How these understandings could feed into things like education, or influence motivation in school settings, may be an interesting future avenue for this research.

Read the paper in full:
Haugen, J., Prenevost, M. H., Nilsen, I. B. R., Bølstad, E., Pons, F., & Reber, R. (2025). How children understand aha‐experiences in problem solving. British Journal of Developmental Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjdp.12565

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