Play and Divergent Problem Solving: Evidence Supporting a Reciprocal Relationship

Assessing the Relationship Between Youth Sport Participation Settings and Creativity in Adulthood

“…Within this body of scholarship, play has been shown to have a positive influence on two primary means of creative expression: problem solving and ideational fluency. With respect to problem solving, play experiences can help children learn to generate a broader range of solutions to challenging problems (Curran, 1999;Wyver & Spence, 1999). In terms of ideational fluency, a meta-analysis of the literature on play and development conducted by Fisher (1992) determined that children who spend more time in openended play tend to display an increased ability to generate a myriad of divergent ideas in their writing, language, and artistic endeavors.…”

Investigating the effects of bimanual multitouch interaction on creativity

“…New-use ideation tasks form the basis for the widely used Alternate Uses Task (AUT), a divergent thinking assessment technique (Christensen, Guilford, Merrifield, & Wilson, 1960;Guilford, 1967) involving the generation of new uses for everyday objects. Throughout extensive and varied use in creativity research the AUT has been shown to reliably measure various aspects of divergent thinking such as ideational fluency, flexibility, and originality (Dyne & Saavedra, 1996;Wyver & Spence, 1999;Ames & Runco, 2005;Fink, Benedek, Grabner, Staudt, & Neubauer, 2007), although there is some debate about how best to evaluate AUT performance (Mouchiroud & Lubart, 2001;Plucker & Runco, 1998b;Silvia, Martin, & Nusbaum, 2009;Silvia et al, 2008). Creativity researchers have also acknowledged that although there is an extensive body of research examining divergent thinking via content-general tasks such as the AUT, a more complete evaluation of creativity must include domain-specific evaluations (T. Amabile, 1996;Pretz & Link, 2008) and research into other components of creative behaviour such as convergent thinking (Runco, 1991;Mouchiroud & Lubart, 2001;Dietrich & Kanso, 2010).…”

“…The Alternate Uses Task has also been used to explore the underlying mental and neurological processes that influence divergent thinking (Gilhooly, Fioratou, Anthony, & Wynn, 2007). Understanding and supporting divergent thinking has important implications in a wide range of areas, including childhood social development (Wyver & Spence, 1999), workplace group dynamics (Dyne & Saavedra, 1996), product design (Dahl & Moreau, 2002), engineering (Dym, Agogino, Eris, Frey, & Leifer, 2005) and entrepreneurship (Ames & Runco, 2005).…”

The microgenetic emergence of cooperative play in 6-year-olds developmentally at-risk

“…Other researchers found that children with a longer history of shared collaboration play were more successful of pretend play (Doyle, Connolly, & Rivest, 1980;Green, Cillessen, Berthelsen, Irving, & Catherwood, 2003;Howes & Norris, 1993), and free play in groups without external interventions leads to significant longer cooperative play (Gmitrová & Gmitrov, 2003). Quality of cooperative play is related to cognitive and social competence in school (Blair, Denham, Kochanoff, & Whipple, 2004;Gruss, Jackson, Grimson, & Hedgcock, 1998;Hogan & Tudge, 1999;Kontos & Keyes, 1999;Lloyd & Howe, 2003;McClelland & Morrison, 2003;NICHD, 2004;Pianta & Stuhlman, 2004;Spinrad et al, 2004;Wyver & Spence, 1999). Cooperative play therefore, is a major developmental task, as children become part of a classroom and a school community (Fantuzzo et al, 1995;Wentzel & Looney, 2007).…”