The Incubation Effect and Resting Network Activity

For many decades in psychology and the history of science the phenomenon of incubation has been known but not fully understood; this is the preparation of a solution to a problem during a period of relative rest. The aim of the present work was to use EEG data to seek patterns of resting state network connectivity during incubation associated with successful postincubation solution of tasks. Subjects carried out a remote associations tests in three stages: a fi rst attempt, incubation (listening to an audio recording irrelevant to solving the task), and a second attempt to solve the unsolved tasks. Subjects who after incubation solved at least one additional task showed a more marked association of the left sensorimotor cortex with the insula and a less marked association with the left dorsolateral frontal cortex during the period of incubation. These data are consistent with the view that at the stage of seeking a solution, the optimum situation is a combination of decreased activity in the executive control network, leading to defocusing of attention, and increased activity in the motivational salience network. © 2021, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.