COG Lecture 7 - Creativity

• Cognitive psychology explores creativity, particularly individual differences and cognitive processes contributing to creative thought.
• Emphasis is placed on understanding how creative thought occurs.
• Original or novel ideas do not necessarily have to be useful or worthwhile to be considered creative.

Creativity in the Arts

• Creativity can set a new style or movement.
• Evaluating the 'worth' of artistic creations is difficult.

Creativity in Science

• Creativity includes new paradigms, useful inventions, and theories that explain more phenomena with fewer assumptions.

Introspective Account of Creativity

• The introspective account emphasizes how self-reflection and internal exploration foster creative thinking.
• Self-reflection and awareness involve looking inward to understand one's mental processes, motivations, and emotions.
• Intrinsic motivation fuels creativity, driven by personal satisfaction, curiosity, or passion, rather than external incentives.

Graham Wallas' 4 Stages of Thinking

• Wallas described four stages of thinking based on introspection and reports from "great thinkers".
• Preparation involves systematic, conscious, and initially fruitless work on a problem.
• Incubation occurs when the problem is set aside for other work.
• Illumination is when the solution to the problem presents itself as a sudden insight.
• Verification is when the solution is developed and tested.

Remote Associates Test (RAT)

• The Remote Associates Test (RAT) involves seeing three unrelated words and finding a fourth that ties them together.
• Studies using RAT have shown that participants who took an incubation break were more likely to solve previously unsolved problems when retested.
• Taking a break (incubation) from a problem leads to improved problem-solving performance.

Why Incubation Works

• Incubation allows for the 'forgetting' of unnecessary constraints or the decay of mental sets.
• During incubation, representations related to the problem remain active and interact with long-term memory.
• He theory suggests that problem-related concepts in memory continue to be activated during incubation.

Introspection Theory Evaluation

• While introspection provides a useful framework for describing creativity and has empirical support for incubation, it is primarily descriptive rather than explanatory.
• The question is raised whether illumination is always a necessary stage and if insight always occurs.

Guilford's Two Types of Creativity

• Guilford identified two types of creative processes: divergent thinking and convergent thinking.
• Divergent thinking involves fluency and novelty, searching for new solutions.
• Convergent thinking involves searching for an 'optimal' solution.
• Both Divergent and Convergent thinking should be used together for optimal problem solving.

Creative Cognition: Geneplore Model

• The Geneplore model, proposed by Fink, suggests that creative thought occurs in two stages, generation and exploration.
• During the generation phase, develop ‘preinventive forms’ or ideas that while are not necessarily solving the problem, can be potentially useful.
• Preinventive forms derive from prior knowledge and involve divergent thinking.
• Next is the exploration phase which utilizes preinventive forms to address the problem through convergent thinking.
• If no solution is found, the cycle returns to the generation stage.

Fink's 1996 Study

• Participants given three object parts to combine into an interesting form, then interpret and describe as a practical object or device.
• Generating preinventive structures before knowing the design goal led to more creative inventions overall.

Path-of-Least-Resistance

• New ideas are often constrained by existing knowledge, relying heavily on it to create new forms.
• Ward's study on imaginary creatures showed that created animals resembled earth animals suggesting a strong influence of prior knowledge and cognitive efficiency.

Geneplore Model Evaluation

• There is some empirical evidence that generation and exploration are crucial processes
• Deferring the evaluation of forms increases novelty.
• However, this model does not describe the processes involved in generating preinventive forms, focusing instead on originality rather than creativity per se.

Improving Creativity via Brainstorming

• Alex Osborn suggested that brainstorming increases idea production.
• The two main principles of brainstorming are a deferment of judgement and quantity breeds quality.
• The four rules are: no evaluation or criticism, encourage wild ideas, quantity over quality, and build on the ideas of others.

Brainstorming Efficiency

• Brainstorming produces more good ideas vs. no brainstorm group.
• Brainstorming is an effective strategy to generate new and useful ideas.

Morphological Creativity

• Zwicky's box involves identifying and defining the parameters or dimensions of a problem.
• Next, a range of variations or possibilities for each parameter are generated.
• These variations are combined in all possible ways to create a multidimensional matrix.
• The resulting combinations are analyzed and evaluated for feasibility and novelty.

Allen's Approach to Morphological Creativity

• Morphological creativity is a problem-solving and idea-generation technique.
• Ideas are found by combining 2 points in the matrix and ideas are then evaluated.

Efficiency of Morphological Creativity

• Morphological synthesis is an effective method to produce good ideas.

Functional Fixedness

• Functional fixedness limits creativity by confining thinking to conventional uses of objects or ideas.

Summary of Key Points

• Creative thought can effectively be studied as a form of ill-defined problem solving
• Wallas provided a reasonable description of creative thought
• Guilford coined 'convergent' and 'divergent' thinking
• Ward and colleagues suggest processes in creative thought, supported by empirical evidence
• Methods such as brainstorming and morphological synthesis can facilitate creative thought