Hypothesis
Letting participants physically draw socks from a bag (a 'first-order', interactive environment) rather than only imagining it would help them discard the misleading ratio information in the socks insight problem.
What failed
Participants randomly assigned to the high-interactivity condition solved the problem correctly within five minutes only marginally more often than the low-interactivity group, and the difference was not significant.
Broken assumption
Physical interaction with the problem materials reliably frees solvers from a misleading framing.
Why
Video analysis showed the second-order condition was hard to realise — participants engaged in dialogue with the experimenter — and that the high-interactivity setup physically reified the misleading ratio, anchoring it rather than defusing it.
From the published paper: Ross et al. Journal of Trial and Error, 2021. ↗CC BY