Cognitive stimulation and problem presentation in idea-generating groups.

Abstract

One technique that may facilitate group brainstorming is decomposition of the task so that categories of the problem are considered one at a time rather than simultaneously (A. R. Dennis, J. S. Valacich, T. Connolly, & B. E. Wynne, 1996). Two studies examined this possibility for both solitary and interactive brainstorming in which major categories of a brainstorming problem were presented simultaneously or sequentially. In the 1st study, participants in the sequential presentation condition generated more ideas than did those in the simultaneous condition in both the individual and the group conditions. In the 2nd study, individuals exposed to either a high number or low number of idea categories demonstrated enhanced performance. Simulations of the data demonstrated that the results were consistent with an associative memory model of the idea generation process.

A new dynamical model of brainstorming: Linear, nonlinear, continuous (simultaneous) and impulsive (sequential) cases

“…Taken together, these findings mean that upward matching is more evident in interactive brainwriting than nominal one. These outcomes were in line with the findings of the Coskun et al (2000) study and modeling of Brown and Paulus (1996).…”

“…This is inconsistent with the finding of the first experiment but consistent with that of the second experiment in Coskun et al (2000) study. This outcome comes from the fact that all participants were stopped every five minutes and instructed to turn their page and continue generating ideas.…”

“…Almost the same type of pattern occurred in a previous piece of research, in a way that participants decreased their performance level after 12 min time periods. Successful continuation of initial performance over a session in sequential priming was also observed in oral or conventional brainstorming (Experiment 1: Coskun et al (2000)) and nominal brainstorming with writing format (Experiment 2: Coskun et al (2000)). …”

“…Along these lines in the brainstorming literature, modeling interactive group brainstorming has become one popular field (Brown & Paulus, 1996;Brown et al, 1998;Coskun et al, 2000). A linear dynamic model of interactive brainstorming was initially developed by Brown and Paulus (1996) in order to account for some of these above mentioned mechanisms or processes.…”

“…Even though the effects of memory instruction (Dugosh, Paulus, Roland, & Yang, 2000) and sequential and simultaneous priming in oral brainstorming (Coskun, Paulus, Brown, & Sherwood, 2000) were investigated in the literature, the present study, consisting of the two experiments, has examined for the first time the combination of these variables in a single research paradigm (individual brainstorming and brainwriting paradigm). The findings of these studies, which would be mentioned later in a detailed way, did produce new outcomes that were mostly in line with the predictions of our model.…”