Incubation (psychology)

Incubation is one of the four proposed stages of creativity, which are preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Incubation is defined as a process of unconscious recombination of thought elements that were stimulated through conscious work at one point in time, resulting in novel ideas at some later point in time. Incubation is related to intuition and insight in that it is the unconscious part of a process whereby an intuition may become validated as an insight. Incubation substantially increases the odds of solving a problem, and benefits from long incubation periods with low cognitive workloads.

The experience of leaving a problem for a period of time and then finding that the difficulty evaporates on returning to the problem, or, even more striking, that the solution "comes out of the blue" when thinking about something else, is widespread. Many guides to effective thinking and problem solving advise the reader to set problems aside for a time.

The most widely adopted paradigm for investigating incubation involves comparing problems on which participants take a break during solving with problems on which participants work for a continuous period. The total time spent on each problem is equated across the conditions, and the incubation period is usually filled with unrelated activity to prevent further conscious work on the problem. Superior performance on problems for which work is split over two sessions is taken as evidence for the incubation effect, which is thus operationally defined as any benefit of a break during problem solving.

When discussing the relation between incubation effect, emotions, and creativity, researchers found that positive mood enhances creativity at work. That means that a given day's creativity would be expected to follow reliably from the previous day's mood, above and beyond any carry-over of that previous day's mood. Theory and research on incubation, long recognized as a part of the creative process, suggest such cross-day effects. Thus, if positive mood on a particular day increases the number and scope of available thoughts, those additional thoughts may incubate overnight, increasing the probability of creative thoughts the following day.

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