How examples may (and may not) constrain creativity

Revealing the distinct impacts of effectiveness recognition and memory retention on the transfer of creative cognitive reappraisal

Previous research has shown that creative cognitive reappraisal is highly effective in regulating negative emotions. We conducted three experiments to explore its transferability. In Experiment 1, we observed that free recall performance was better for creative reappraisal compared to non-creative reappraisal. Memory retention of reappraisals was associated with creativity ratings, but not with perceived effectiveness ratings. In Experiment 2, participants generated reappraisals for newly introduced unpleasant images before (pre-session) and after (post-session) exposure to creative reappraisal, non-creative reappraisal, and descriptive control interpretation. Results showed increased reflective effectiveness of self-generated reappraisals in the post-session. The level of creativity of the self-generated reappraisals was associated with differences in perceived effectiveness between creative and non-creative exposed reappraisals. In Experiment 3, we investigated how two processing approaches (effectiveness-oriented vs. memory-oriented) influenced the transferability of creative reappraisal. We observed creativity levels of self-generated reappraisals increased in both conditions. The reflective effectiveness of the self-generated reappraisals tended to increase only in the effectiveness-oriented processing condition. Our findings demonstrate that recognising the effectiveness of creative reappraisal plays a crucial role in its transfer across different situations.

Impact of the quality and diversity of reference products on creative activities in online communities

In creativity research, an important unresolved issue relates to identifying the kind of information an individual should be exposed to in order to be highly creative. We aimed to gain insights into this issue; we collected and statistically analyzed three datasets related to three large online communities (namely Cities: Skylines, SCP-wiki, and Archive of Our Own) engaged in mod development and novel writing to examine whether the quality and diversity of other people's products referred to have a positive effect on product generation. Our analysis revealed the following three findings: (1) the quality diversity of reference products generated by others has the most positive impact on the quality of generated products when it is neither high nor low, (2) the content diversity of reference products generated by others has a negative impact on the quality of generated products, and (3) the quality of reference products generated by others has a negative impact on the quality of generated products when it is extremely high. We conclude by discussing the implications of the findings for creativity research.

A systematic framework of creative metacognition

Creative cognition does not just involve cognitive processes in direct service of the main task objective (e.g., idea generation), but also metacognitive processes that monitor and regulate cognition adaptively (e.g., evaluation of ideas and task performance, or development and selection of task strategies). Although metacognition is vital for creative performance, relevant work is sparse, which may be partly due to persistent ambiguities in the theoretical conceptualization of creative metacognition. Therefore, this article proposes a systematic framework of creative metacognition (CMC), which builds on recent advancements in metacognition theory and extends them to meet the specifics of creative cognition. The CMC framework consists of two dynamic components-monitoring and control-and a more static component of metacognitive knowledge, each subsuming metacognitive processes applying to the level of task, performance, and responses. We describe the presumed function of these metacognitive components in the creative process, present evidence in support of each, and discuss their association with related constructs, such as creative self-beliefs. We further highlight the dynamic interplay of metacognitive processes across task performance and identify promising avenues for future research.

Understanding how Designers Find and Use Data Visualization Examples

Examples are useful for inspiring ideas and facilitating implementation in visualization design. However, there is little understanding of how visualization designers use examples, and how computational tools may support such activities. In this paper, we contribute an exploratory study of current practices in incorporating visualization examples. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 university students and 15 professional designers. Our analysis focus on two core design activities: searching for examples and utilizing examples. We characterize observed strategies and tools for performing these activities, as well as major challenges that hinder designers' current workflows. In addition, we identify themes that cut across these two activities: criteria for determining example usefulness, curation practices, and design fixation. Given our findings, we discuss the implications for visualization design and authoring tools and highlight critical areas for future research.

Semantic Memory and Creativity: The Costs and Benefits of Semantic Memory Structure in Generating Original Ideas

Despite its theoretical importance, little is known about how semantic memory structure facilitates and constrains creative idea production. We examine whether the semantic richness of a concept has both benefits and costs to creative idea production. Specifically, we tested whether cue set-size-an index of semantic richness reflecting the average number of elements associated with a given concept-impacts the quantity (fluency) and quality (originality) of responses generated during the alternate uses task (AUT). Across four studies, we show that low-association, sparse, AUT cues benefit originality at the cost of fluency compared to high-association, rich, AUT cues. Furthermore, we found an interaction with individual differences in fluid intelligence in the low-association AUT cues, suggesting that constraints of sparse semantic knowledge can be overcome with top-down intervention. The findings indicate that semantic richness differentially impacts the quality and quantity of generated ideas, and that cognitive control processes can facilitate idea production when conceptual knowledge is limited.

Cultural Variations in Evaluation of Creative Work: A Comparison of Russian and Emirati Samples

The study investigates how cultural variations influence evaluation of creative work. Russian and Emirati undergraduate college students were asked to judge alien creature drawings produced by their country mates in previous studies’ structured imagination test. We found cultural differences in creativity judgment. Emirati participants’ judgments were significantly lower than Russian participants’ judgments. We also found that Russians judged their compatriots significantly higher than the Emirati judged their compatriots. Russians also judged foreigners significantly lower than the Emirati judged foreigners. These findings were speculatively placed in the context of the cultural differences in the implicit theory of creativity.

Need something different? Here's what's been done: Effects of examples and task instructions on creative idea generation

Creative idea generation involves search and retrieval of memory. There is a default tendency to rely too heavily on familiar or easily accessible information during idea generation, especially in tasks such as the alternate uses task (AUT) that involve generating novel uses for common objects. Knowing which obvious ideas to avoid may be important in creating more original ideas. The present experiments tested whether instructions encouraging participants to avoid a set of common example ideas would enhance originality or cause fixation on the AUT. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that presenting a verbal list of common example uses along with a warning to avoid those uses enhanced originality. In contrast, when the example ideas were presented in the absence of any "avoid" instructions, there was no benefit on originality, indicating that mere example exposure did not stimulate more creative idea generation. The design of Experiment 2 was parallel to that of Experiment 1, but the verbal examples were replaced with visually depicted examples. Exposure to the visual examples led to reduced originality, suggesting fixation. Although the "avoid" instruction helped to mitigate this fixation, it did not enhance originality beyond the no-example condition. The results suggest that under some conditions presenting unoriginal examples along with an "avoid" warning can allow people to shift their focus away from easily retrieved ideas and toward more novel approaches. The results are also consistent with prior work showing a negative impact of visual presentation of examples on creativity.

Imaginary Companions in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

One of the deficits observed in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is impaired imaginative play. One form of imaginative play common in many typically developing (TD) children is having an imaginary companion (IC). The occurrence of ICs has not been investigated extensively in children with ASD. We examined differences in parent report of IC between TD and ASD populations in 215 (111 with ASD) gender-matched children aged between 2 and 8 years. Findings indicate that significantly fewer children with ASD created ICs, although there were many between-group similarities in IC forms and functions. Results are discussed in terms of qualitative differences in play, social attributions, and how children with ASD conceptualize their ICs' minds.

Divergent Thinking Promotes Deductive Reasoning in Preschoolers

This study explored the hypothesis that preschoolers' deductive reasoning would be improved by encouraging use of divergent thinking (DT). Children of 4-5 years of age (n = 120) were randomly given DT or neutral control exercises before deductive reasoning problems. To allow a stronger test of the hypothesis, half of the children receiving the DT exercises were given explicit examples, which have been shown to reduce ideational originality. Results indicate that, as predicted, DT exercises without examples significantly improved rates of deductive responding, compared to exercises with examples and the control condition. These findings indicate that DT is a key component in the early beginnings of deductive reasoning. Some educational implications are discussed.

Ethical Concerns of and Risk Mitigation Strategies for Crowdsourcing Contests and Innovation Challenges: Scoping Review

BACKGROUND

Crowdsourcing contests (also called innovation challenges, innovation contests, and inducement prize contests) can be used to solicit multisectoral feedback on health programs and design public health campaigns. They consist of organizing a steering committee, soliciting contributions, engaging the community, judging contributions, recognizing a subset of contributors, and sharing with the community.

OBJECTIVE

This scoping review describes crowdsourcing contests by stage, examines ethical problems at each stage, and proposes potential ways of mitigating risk.

METHODS

Our analysis was anchored in the specific example of a crowdsourcing contest that our team organized to solicit videos promoting condom use in China. The purpose of this contest was to create compelling 1-min videos to promote condom use. We used a scoping review to examine the existing ethical literature on crowdsourcing to help identify and frame ethical concerns at each stage.

RESULTS

Crowdsourcing has a group of individuals solve a problem and then share the solution with the public. Crowdsourcing contests provide an opportunity for community engagement at each stage: organizing, soliciting, promoting, judging, recognizing, and sharing. Crowdsourcing poses several ethical concerns: organizing-potential for excluding community voices; soliciting-potential for overly narrow participation; promoting-potential for divulging confidential information; judging-potential for biased evaluation; recognizing-potential for insufficient recognition of the finalist; and sharing-potential for the solution to not be implemented or widely disseminated.

CONCLUSIONS

Crowdsourcing contests can be effective and engaging public health tools but also introduce potential ethical problems. We present methods for the responsible conduct of crowdsourcing contests.

Drawing links between the autism cognitive profile and imagination: Executive function and processing bias in imaginative drawings by children with and without autism

Little is known about the relation between cognitive processes and imagination and whether this relation differs between neurotypically developing children and children with autism. To address this issue, we administered a cognitive task battery and Karmiloff-Smith’s drawing task, which requires children to draw imaginative people and houses. For children with autism, executive function significantly predicted imaginative drawing. In neurotypically developing controls, executive function and cognitive-perceptual processing style predicted imaginative drawing, but these associations were moderated by mental age. In younger (neurotypically developing) children, better executive function and a local processing bias were associated with imagination; in older children, only a global bias was associated with imagination. These findings suggest that (a) with development there are changes in the type of cognitive processes involved in imagination and (b) children with autism employ a unique cognitive strategy in imaginative drawing.

Crowdsourcing HIV Test Promotion Videos: A Noninferiority Randomized Controlled Trial in China

BACKGROUND

Crowdsourcing, the process of shifting individual tasks to a large group, may enhance human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing interventions. We conducted a noninferiority, randomized controlled trial to compare first-time HIV testing rates among men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender individuals who received a crowdsourced or a health marketing HIV test promotion video.

METHODS

Seven hundred twenty-one MSM and transgender participants (≥16 years old, never before tested for HIV) were recruited through 3 Chinese MSM Web portals and randomly assigned to 1 of 2 videos. The crowdsourced video was developed using an open contest and formal transparent judging while the evidence-based health marketing video was designed by experts. Study objectives were to measure HIV test uptake within 3 weeks of watching either HIV test promotion video and cost per new HIV test and diagnosis.

RESULTS

Overall, 624 of 721 (87%) participants from 31 provinces in 217 Chinese cities completed the study. HIV test uptake was similar between the crowdsourced arm (37% [114/307]) and the health marketing arm (35% [111/317]). The estimated difference between the interventions was 2.1% (95% confidence interval, -5.4% to 9.7%). Among those tested, 31% (69/225) reported a new HIV diagnosis. The crowdsourced intervention cost substantially less than the health marketing intervention per first-time HIV test (US$131 vs US$238 per person) and per new HIV diagnosis (US$415 vs US$799 per person).

CONCLUSIONS

Our nationwide study demonstrates that crowdsourcing may be an effective tool for improving HIV testing messaging campaigns and could increase community engagement in health campaigns.

CLINICAL TRIALS REGISTRATION

NCT02248558.

Who creates value in a user innovation community? A case study of MyStarbucksIdea.com

Purpose

– Successful open innovation requires that many ideas be posted by a number of users and that the posted ideas be evaluated to find ideas of high quality. As such, successful open innovation community would have inherently information overload problem. The purpose of this paper is to mitigate the information problem by identifying potential idea launchers, so that they can pay attention to their ideas.

Design/methodology/approach

– This research chose MyStarbucksIdea.com as a target innovation community where users freely share their ideas and comments. We extracted basic features from idea, comment and user information and added further features obtained from sentiment analysis on ideas and comments. Those features are used to develop classification models to identify potential idea launchers, using data mining techniques such as artificial neural network, decision tree and Bayesian network.

Findings

– The results show that the number of ideas posted and the number of comments posted are the most significant among the features. And most of comment-related sentiment features found to be meaningful, while most of idea-related sentiment features are not in the prediction of idea launchers. In addition, this study show classification rules for the identification of potential idea launchers.

Originality/value

– This study dealt with information overload problem in an open innovation context. A large volume of textual customer contents from an innovation community were examined and classification models to mitigate the problem were proposed using sentiment analysis and data mining techniques. Experimental results show that the proposed classification models can help the firm identify potential idea launchers for its efficient business innovation.

The influence of category representations on exemplar generation

The present study examined the influence of category representations on exemplar generation, which has been neglected in previous category research. An experiment on college students manipulated the category representation of insects in three conditions (prototypes, exemplars, and the hybrid of prototypes and exemplars). Participants were asked to generate as many exemplars as possible. The results demonstrate that category representations affect and constrain exemplar generation. The new findings are as follows. In the prototype and hybrid conditions with the prototype representation, people tend to generate more valid exemplars by using the prototype mutation mechanism, and exemplar generation conforms to the family resemblance structure. Exemplar generation in the hybrid condition is additionally constrained by known exemplars. In the exemplar condition, people tend to generate fewer valid exemplars by using miscellaneous strategies, and their exemplar generation may not conform to the family resemblance structure.

Fostering creativity in product and service development: validation in the domain of information technology

OBJECTIVE

This research is intended to empirically validate a general model of creative product and service development proposed in the literature.

BACKGROUND

A current research gap inspired construction of a conceptual model to capture fundamental phases and pertinent facilitating metacognitive strategies in the creative design process. The model also depicts the mechanism by which design creativity affects consumer behavior. The validity and assets of this model have not yet been investigated.

METHOD

Four laboratory studies were conducted to demonstrate the value of the proposed cognitive phases and associated metacognitive strategies in the conceptual model. Realistic product and service design problems were used in creativity assessment to ensure ecological validity.

RESULTS

Design creativity was enhanced by explicit problem analysis, whereby one formulates problems from different perspectives and at different levels of abstraction. Remote association in conceptual combination spawned more design creativity than did near association. Abstraction led to greater creativity in conducting conceptual expansion than did specificity, which induced mental fixation. Domain-specific knowledge and experience enhanced design creativity, indicating that design can be of a domain-specific nature. Design creativity added integrated value to products and services and positively influenced customer behavior.

CONCLUSION

The validity and value of the proposed conceptual model is supported by empirical findings.

APPLICATION

The conceptual model of creative design could underpin future theory development. Propositions advanced in this article should provide insights and approaches to facilitate organizations pursuing product and service creativity to gain competitive advantage.

The relationship of analogical distance to analogical function and preinventive structure: the case of engineering design

Analogy was studied in real-world engineering design, using the in vivo method. Analogizing was found to occur frequently, entailing a roughly equal amount of within- and between-domain analogies. In partial support for theories of unconscious plagiarism (Brown & Murphy, 1989; Marsh, Landau, & Hicks, 1996) and Ward's (1994) path-of-least-resistance model, it was found that the reference to exemplars (in the form of prototypes) significantly reduced the number of between-domain analogies between source and target, as compared with using sketches or no external representational systems. Analogy served three functions in relation to novel design concepts: identifying problems, solving problems, and explaining concepts. Problem identifying analogies were mainly within domain, explanatory analogies were mainly between domain, and problem-solving analogies were a mixture of within- and between-domain analogies.

Creative Thinking in Adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

A widened attentional focus, that is typically associated with ADHD, has been postulated to be accompanied by enhanced creative ability. However, creativity has been only limitedly examined in ADHD. Performance across several creativity measures were investigated in three groups: adolescents with ADHD, those with conduct disorder, and a healthy control sample. The ADHD group exhibited selective cognitive advantages and disadvantages by demonstrating an enhanced ability in overcoming the constraining influence of examples, but a reduced capacity to generate a functional invention during an imagery task. These findings are interpreted with reference to inhibitory control mechanisms and the contextual modulation of creative cognition.

When elaboration leads to appropriation: Unconscious plagiarism in a creative task

Brown and Murphy's (1989) three-stage paradigm (generation, recall-own, generate-new) was used to assess the effects of participant elaboration on rates of unconscious plagiarism in two experiments using a creative task. Following the generation phase, participants imagined and rated a quarter of the ideas (imagery elaboration), generated improvements to another quarter (generative elaboration), and listened to a quarter of the ideas again without elaboration, with the remaining ideas acting as control. A week later, participants attempted to recall their own ideas, and generate new solutions to the same cues. In Experiment 1 both forms of elaboration equally increased correct recall, and decreased plagiarism in the generate-new task. However, generative elaboration led to significantly greater plagiarism in the recall-own task, but imagery elaboration did not. Participants in Experiment 2 were encouraged not to plagiarise by means of a financial incentive. However, they showed the same pattern as seen in Experiment 1. Therefore, contrary to a simple strength account, the probability of a person plagiarising another's ideas is linked to the particular nature of the elaboration carried out on that idea, rather than its familiarity.