Divergent thinking: Strategies and executive involvement in generating novel uses for familiar objects

Abstract

Although the Alternative Uses divergent thinking task has been widely used in psychometric and experimental studies of creativity, the cognitive processes underlying this task have not been examined in detail before the two studies are reported here. In Experiment 1, a verbal protocol analysis study of the Alternative Uses task was carried out with a Think aloud group (N=40) and a Silent control group (N=64). The groups did not differ in fluency or novelty of idea production indicating no verbal overshadowing. Analysis of protocols from the Think aloud group suggested that initial responses were based on a strategy of Retrieval from long-term memory of pre-known uses. Later responses tended to be based on a small number of other strategies: property-use generation, imagined Disassembly of the target object into components and scanning of Broad Use categories for possible uses of the target item. Novelty of uses was particularly associated with the Disassembly strategy. Experiment 2 (N=103) addressed the role of executive processes in generating new and previously known uses by examining individual differences in category fluency, letter fluency and divergent task performance. After completing the task, participants were asked to indicate which of their responses were new for them. It was predicted and found in regression analyses that letter fluency (an executively loading task) was related to production of 'new' uses and category fluency was related to production of 'old' uses but not vice versa.

Remotely Close Associations: Openness to Experience and Semantic Memory Structure

“…AUTs involve many cognitive components related to creative cognition such as the inhibition of common uses, cognitive flexibility, conceptual expansion, and the combination of disparate concepts to form unique associations (Gilhooly, Fioratou, Anthony, & Wynn, 2007;Guilford, 1967;Hass, 2016).…”

Why Creativity Isn’t in IQ Tests, Why it Matters, and Why it Won’t Change Anytime Soon Probably

“…Jung [40] notes that intelligence can be seen as problem solving at an everyday level (e.g., [41]), whereas creativity may represent problem solving for less common issues (e.g., [42]). Others argue that creativity and intelligence are both cognitive functions [43] or that divergent thinking is simply an executive cognitive function [44].…”

A snapshot of creativity: Evaluating a quick and simple method for assessing divergent thinking

“…For example, people's later responses are usually more creative than their first few responses (Christensen et al, 1957), responses that people generated on the spot are more creative than responses retrieved from memory (Gilhooly et al, 2007), and the two responses that people picked as their "top two" are more creative than the rest (Silvia, 2008c). Responses can also be coded for their length, elaborateness, concreteness, cleverness, and their clustering into classes-these open-ended tasks provide a lot of information.…”

“…Since then, many studies have used some kind of subjective quality rating. The most common approach is to have raters give a score to each response (e.g., Gilhooly et al, 2007, Harrington, 1975and Silvia and Phillips, 2004. These scores can then be averaged for an overall score for the task.…”