Are Speedy Brains Needed when Divergent Thinking is Speeded—or Unspeeded?

Forthmann, Boris; Lips, Corinna; Szardenings, Carsten; Scharfen, Jana; Benedek, Mathias

doi:10.1002/jocb.350

Cited by 18 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…For each participant, the summative measure was simply the number of original (non-example) ideas generated (Agogue et al, 2014;Radel, Davranche, Fournier, & Dietrich, 2015). A second ratio measure divided the number of original (nonexample) responses by the total of (non-example) responses (Forthmann, Lips, Szardenings, Scharfen, & Holling, 2018;. Analyses of these two measures yielded similar patterns, as reported below.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 72%

Need something different? Here’s what’s been done: Effects of examples and task instructions on creative idea generation

George

Wiley

2020

Mem Cogn

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Creative idea generation involves search and retrieval of memory. There is a default tendency to rely too heavily on familiar or easily accessible information during idea generation, especially in tasks such as the alternate uses task (AUT) that involve generating novel uses for common objects. Knowing which obvious ideas to avoid may be important in creating more original ideas. The present experiments tested whether instructions encouraging participants to avoid a set of common example ideas would enhance originality or cause fixation on the AUT. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that presenting a verbal list of common example uses along with a warning to avoid those uses enhanced originality. In contrast, when the example ideas were presented in the absence of any "avoid" instructions, there was no benefit on originality, indicating that mere example exposure did not stimulate more creative idea generation. The design of Experiment 2 was parallel to that of Experiment 1, but the verbal examples were replaced with visually depicted examples. Exposure to the visual examples led to reduced originality, suggesting fixation. Although the "avoid" instruction helped to mitigate this fixation, it did not enhance originality beyond the no-example condition. The results suggest that under some conditions presenting unoriginal examples along with an "avoid" warning can allow people to shift their focus away from easily retrieved ideas and toward more novel approaches. The results are also consistent with prior work showing a negative impact of visual presentation of examples on creativity.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 72%

Need something different? Here’s what’s been done: Effects of examples and task instructions on creative idea generation

George

Wiley

2020

Mem Cogn

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“…While recent CI studies have made considerable advances in that direction by identifying the dual-process (Nijstad et al, 2010; Sowden et al, 2015) and collaborative nature of brain networks contributing to distinct cognitive resources of CI (Beaty et al, 2015; Volle, 2018), their conclusions converge with pioneering behavioral work. That is, CI is an effortful process (Binet, 1900; Christensen et al, 1957; Parnes, 1961; Jaušovec, 1997; De Dreu et al, 2008; Green et al, 2015; Kenett, 2018) likely more fruitful with greater processing speed in a given unit of time (Dorfman et al, 2008; Vartanian et al, 2009; Preckel et al, 2011; Forthmann et al, 2018a). For example, serial-order effect research shows that as people iterate ideas in DT-type tasks, response rates decrease while response originality increases (Christensen et al, 1957; Beaty and Silvia, 2012; Heinonen et al, 2016; Silvia Paul et al, 2017; Wang et al, 2017; Acar et al, 2018).…”

Section: Measuring Creative Ideation: History and Prospectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reciprocally, a test-taker generating 15 responses in 10 min, has an average response time of 40 s. Operationalizing fluency as response time has the clear advantage of relaxing constraints of time limits for task completion (although instructions should encourage the prompt resolution of the task). Because time pressure impacts response quality in CI tasks (Runco and Acar, 2012; Forthmann et al, 2018a), such self-paced format is desirable (Kogan, 2008). It offers a naturalistic and ecologically valid setting, and provides more room for persistence ( effort ) which is an essential pathway to achieving creative ideas (De Dreu et al, 2008; Nijstad et al, 2010).…”

Section: Mtci Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Dynamics of Creative Ideation: Introducing a New Assessment Paradigm

2018

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Despite six decades of creative cognition research, measures of creative ideation have heavily relied on divergent thinking tasks, which still suffer from conceptual, design, and psychometric shortcomings. These shortcomings have greatly impeded the accurate study of creative ideation, its dynamics, development, and integration as part of a comprehensive psychological assessment. After a brief overview of the historical and current anchoring of creative ideation measurement, overlooked challenges in its most common operationalization (i.e., divergent thinking tasks framework) are discussed. They include (1) the reliance on a single stimulus as a starting point of the creative ideation process (stimulus-dependency), (2) the analysis of response quality based on a varying number of observations across test-takers (fluency-dependency), and (3) the production of “static” cumulative performance indicators. Inspired from an emerging line of work from the field of cognitive neuroscience of creativity, this paper introduces a new assessment framework referred to as “Multi-Trial Creative Ideation” (MTCI). This framework shifts the current measurement paradigm by (1) offering a variety of stimuli presented in a well-defined set of ideation “trials,” (2) reinterprets the concept of ideational fluency using a time-analysis of idea generation, and (3) captures individual dynamics in the ideation process (e.g., modeling the effort-time required to reach a response of maximal uncommonness) while controlling for stimulus-specific sources of variation. Advantages of the MTCI framework over the classic divergent thinking paradigm are discussed in light of current directions in the field of creativity research.

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“…The study of divergent thinking in general has spanned generations of creativity researchers. Though the tasks that measure divergent thinking are disparate (e.g., Forthmann et al, 2018 ), and may not be interchangeable (cf. Silvia, 2011 ; Runco et al, 2016 ), this study was focused on cognitive analyses of the acts of generating alternative uses for objects, and generating consequences of impossible situations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Use or Consequences: Probing the Cognitive Difference Between Two Measures of Divergent Thinking

Hass

Beaty

2018

Front. Psychol.

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Recent studies have highlighted both similarities and differences between the cognitive processing that underpins memory retrieval and that which underpins creative thinking. To date, studies have focused more heavily on the Alternative Uses task, but fewer studies have investigated the processing underpinning other idea generation tasks. This study examines both Alternative Uses and Consequences idea generation with a methods pulled from cognitive psychology, and a novel method for evaluating the creativity of such responses. Participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk using a custom interface allowing for requisite experimental control. Results showed that both Alternative Uses and Consequences generation are well approximated by an exponential cumulative response time model, consistent with studies of memory retrieval. Participants were also slower to generate their first consequence compared with first responses to Alternative Uses, but inter-response time was negatively related to pairwise similarity on both tasks. Finally, the serial order effect is exhibited for both tasks, with Consequences earning more creative evaluations than Uses. The results have implications for burgeoning neuroscience research on creative thinking, and suggestions are made for future areas of inquiry. In addition, the experimental apparatus described provides an equitable way for researchers to obtain good quality cognitive data for divergent thinking tasks.

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Are Speedy Brains Needed when Divergent Thinking is Speeded—or Unspeeded?

Cited by 18 publications

References 57 publications

Need something different? Here’s what’s been done: Effects of examples and task instructions on creative idea generation

Need something different? Here’s what’s been done: Effects of examples and task instructions on creative idea generation

The Dynamics of Creative Ideation: Introducing a New Assessment Paradigm

Use or Consequences: Probing the Cognitive Difference Between Two Measures of Divergent Thinking

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