The importance of chance and interactivity in creativity

Two experiments examined whether different task ecologies influenced insight problem solving. The 17 animals problem was employed, a pure insight problem. Its initial formulation encourages the application of a direct arithmetic solution, but its solution requires the spatial arrangement of sets involving some degree of overlap. Participants were randomly allocated to either a tablet condition where they could use a stylus and an electronic tablet to sketch a solution or a model building condition where participants were given material with which to build enclosures and figurines. In both experiments, participants were much more likely to develop a working solution in the model building condition. The difference in performance elicited by different task ecologies was unrelated to individual differences in working memory, actively open-minded thinking, or need for cognition (Experiment 1), although individual differences in creativity were correlated with problem solving success in Experiment 2. The discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for the prevailing metatheoretical commitment to methodological individualism that places the individual as the ontological locus of cognition.

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“…For the next 1:24 minutes the participant worked out the distribution of the animals such as to meet the problem requirement. (Kirsh, 2014).…”

Section: Trajectory To Solution: Singular and Contingentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Insight with hands and things

et al. 2016

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“…Research on expert Tetris players suggests an inverted U-shaped relationship of action and expertise with complementary actions decreasing as expertise increases (Destefano, Lindstedt, & Gray, 2011). In his word production task, Kirsh (2014) also reports a significantly different strategy between the best and the worst performing participants reflected by the number of shuffles. Excess shuffling represented a disadvantage either because the participants who shuffled more were less able to produce words and so chose to shuffle more frequently to break their impasse or because shuffling too much was itself a poor strategy.…”

Section: Individual Differences In Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, Kirsh (2014) used this task to test more explicitly the role of luck in word production. Alongside a low-and high-interactivity task environment he introduced a shuffle condition to isolate the element of chance.…”

Section: The Word Production Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Catch that word: interactivity, serendipity and verbal fluency in a word production task

Ross

Vallée-Tourangeau

2020

Psychological Research

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Problem solving outside of the cognitive psychologist's lab unfolds in an environment rich with bodily gesture and material artefacts. We examine this meshwork of internal mental resources, embodied actions and environmental affordances through the lens of a word production task with letter tiles. Forty participants took part in the study which contrasted performance in a high interactivity condition (where participants were able to move letter tiles at will), a low interactivity condition (where movements were restrained) and a shuffle condition (where participants could not move the tiles but were allowed to randomly rearrange the array). Participants were also video recorded to facilitate coding of behaviour. While aggregate performance measures revealed a marginal impact of interactivity on performance, when the participants' behaviour was taken into account, interactivity had a consistent and statistically significant beneficial effect. Detailed, exploratory examination of a subsample of participants informed the formulation of additional hypotheses tested across the full sample: the luckiness of the shuffle in that condition significantly predicted the number of words produced and a more efficient strategy was significantly easier to enact in the high interactivity condition. Additionally, two detailed case studies revealed several moments when accidental changes to the letter tile array offered unplanned words reflecting a serendipitous coagency as well as many moments when environmental chance was ignored. These data and observations indicate that interactivity, serendipity, and internal cognitive resources determine problem-solving performance in this task.

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“…119-120). Cognitive archaeology is ultimately about the relationship between human cognition and physical human artifice, and this perspective can challenge notions of cognition (Kirsh, 2014;Sterelny, 2017;Vallée-Tourangeau, 2014).…”

Section: Epistemic Challenges and Valuementioning

confidence: 99%

From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology

Currie

Killin

2019

Mind & Language

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Cognitive archaeologists infer from material remains to the cognitive features of past societies. We characterize cognitive archaeology in terms of trace‐based reasoning, which in the case of cognitive archaeology involves inferences drawing upon background theory linking objects from the archaeological record to cognitive (including psychological, symbolic, and ideological) features. We analyse such practices, examining work on cognitive evolution, language, and musicality. We argue that the central epistemic challenge for cognitive archaeology is often not a paucity of material remains, but insufficient constraint from cognitive theories. However, we also argue that the success of cognitive archaeology does not necessarily require well‐developed cognitive theories: Success might instead lead to them.

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The importance of chance and interactivity in creativity

Cited by 40 publications

References 26 publications

Insight with hands and things

Insight with hands and things

Catch that word: interactivity, serendipity and verbal fluency in a word production task

From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology

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