Matching Items (40)
Description
Creativity is a critical element of human cognition for which any complete explanation of the human mind must account, and it presents a unique problem to cognitive science because the apparent "something from nothing" nature of creativity confounds simple transformations of existing information. Emergentism provides a philosophical framework for explaining this feature of creativity by elaborating how novel properties of a system can be created from the complex interactions of simple elements within that system. Previous advances in cognitive science have been built the traditional information processing models of cognition. These models are limited in their ability to explain emergentism or allow for detailed behavioral measurement and understanding of cognition as it unfolds in time. In this study, I piloted the use state-of-the-art dynamical systems models of cognition and motion capture technology to measure information about cognitive and neural processes in the moments preceding creative insight. Insight problem solving refers to the phenomenon of experiencing an impasse when attempting to solve a problem that is later overcome in a flash of insight, sometimes called an "Aha!" or "Eureka!" moment. The use of these techniques to study insight problem solving provides evidence of the dynamical nature of cognition during creative tasks that may help us explore how creativity emerges from neural activity.
ContributorsHart Jr, John Thomas (Author) / Duran, Nicholas (Thesis director) / Nishimura, Joel (Committee member) / School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
The first thought that comes to mind for most people when they hear of improvisation is most likely the memory of a funny performance seen on television shows such as Who’s Line is it Anyway? or perhaps the opportunity to be an audience member for a live improv troupe performance. In either of these settings, improvisation can be hilarious, dramatic and entertaining and it makes you wonder how people could possibly be making these scenes up on the spot. Unfortunately, not everyone has first-hand experience with the creative, team-building “magic” of improvisation games and exercises. Watching professional improvisation perform can be intimidating to an observer who hopes to one day be an improvisor themselves. Because of this, the immense benefits that improvisation can have within a professional workplace are often overlooked or ignored. I, myself, never had any experience with improvisation or being on stage until the second semester of my sophomore year when I made the choice to try out for ASU comedy.
ContributorsRussell, Anna (Author) / Soares, Rebecca (Thesis director) / Gneiting, Gary (Committee member) / College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (Contributor) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The introductory section of my thesis will draw heavily from sources written by experts in the field of creative thinking. First, I will introduce the ideas proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his groundbreaking publications, Flow and Finding Flow. Here, I will discuss the "what" and "why" elements of my thesis, more specifically explaining why creativity is so important and how it could serve to improve the lives of those feeling emotionally or intellectually stifled by their stays in long-term healthcare facilities. Next I will use the steps outlined in Keith Sawyer's Zig Zag to explain the different elements that are involved in achieving creativity, "flow," and fulfillment. This will begin to touch on the issue of "how" from a theoretical perspective. For the latter half of my thesis, I draw from case studies, research papers, and design solutions from architects, designers, and manufacturers alike to begin imagining what designing a creatively conducive long-term care facility would entail, along with providing some examples of how these spaces might look, feel, and function. This portion is not meant to be a comprehensive design solution, but is simply meant to provide a framework and foundation for healthcare designers interested in incorporating creative spaces into their designs. The conclusion of this thesis is that creatively conducive spaces would be a beneficial contribution to the health care environment, particularly in settings that provide long-term care for individuals with limited capacity to leave the facility. These creative spaces will be guided by three key themes: (1) taking influence from children's health care facilities, which are more focused on the formative experiences of the user, (2) utilizing technology to provide opportunity for creative inspiration, expression, and collaboration, and (3) providing patients with the means to be creatively productive, including giving patients the power to control aspects of their environment.
ContributorsHumphrey, Amanda Rose (Author) / Bernardi, Jose (Thesis director) / Neaves, Jeff (Committee member) / Pickett, Christine (Committee member) / Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (Contributor) / The Design School (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
In this study, the oppositional processes theory was proposed to suggest that reliance on semantic and episodic memory systems hinder originality during idea generation for divergent thinking tasks that are generally used to assess creative potential. In order to investigate the proposed oppositional processes theory, three experiments that manipulated the memory accessibility in participants during the alternative uses tasks were conducted. Experiment 1 directly instructed participants to either generate usages based on memory or not from memory; Experiment 2 provided participants with object cues that were either very common or very rare in daily life (i.e., bottle vs. canteen); Experiment 3 replicated the same manipulation from Experiment 2 with much longer generation time (10 minutes in Experiment 2 vs. 30 minutes in Experiment 3). The oppositional processes theory predicted that participants who had less access to direct and unaltered usages (i.e., told to not use memory, were given rare cues, or were outputting items later in the generation period) during the task would be more creative. Results generally supported the predictions in Experiments 1 and 2 where participants from conditions which limited their access to memory generated more novel usages that were considered more creative by independent coders. Such effects were less prominent in Experiment 3 with extended generation time but the trends remained the same.
ContributorsXu, Dongchen (Author) / Brewer, Gene (Thesis advisor) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Homa, Donald (Committee member) / Goldinger, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Serious play—the notion of bringing the benefits of play to bear on work-related tasks—is receiving more attention as a remedy to many challenges of the modern knowledge economy. Exploring and defining the role of serious play approaches to facilitate collaborative problem-solving and value creation, this dissertation consists of four related research papers.
The first research paper (RP1) reconciles three different conceptualizations of knowledge into a new theory of knowledge. This pluralistic definition allows knowledge to change character across the span of the value creation process. The paper further introduces a model called the Wheel of Knowledge (WoK) for mobilizing knowledge throughout the different knowledge conversions of the value creation process. The second research paper (RP2) advocates that serious play can scaffold and accelerate these knowledge conversion processes, it disaggregates existing serious play approaches, and starts to operationalize the WoK by using it to match different types of serious play approaches to different types of knowledge conversion challenges. The third research paper (RP3) validates the WoK by sorting the serious play literature according to how it applies to the different knowledge conversion processes. The paper provides a framework for ascertaining the applicability of serious play methods to specific knowledge conversion challenges and identifies under-explored research areas of the serious play field. The fourth research paper (RP4) tests the recommendations of RP3 by applying the LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) method to a knowledge conversion challenge focused on tacit knowledge sharing. It reports on a mixed-methods, multi-session case study in which LSP was used to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue and deliberation about a wicked problem. Results show that LSP is particularly useful in the beginning of a value creation process and that it facilitates socialization and tacit knowledge sharing. Taken together the papers demonstrate the necessity, potential, and application of serious play as a catalyst for the knowledge conversion processes presented in the WoK. It is now clear that different serious play approaches are suitable as respectively: an accelerator for trust-building and collective creativity, as a conduit for iterative innovation, and as a way of making rote tasks more engaging.
The first research paper (RP1) reconciles three different conceptualizations of knowledge into a new theory of knowledge. This pluralistic definition allows knowledge to change character across the span of the value creation process. The paper further introduces a model called the Wheel of Knowledge (WoK) for mobilizing knowledge throughout the different knowledge conversions of the value creation process. The second research paper (RP2) advocates that serious play can scaffold and accelerate these knowledge conversion processes, it disaggregates existing serious play approaches, and starts to operationalize the WoK by using it to match different types of serious play approaches to different types of knowledge conversion challenges. The third research paper (RP3) validates the WoK by sorting the serious play literature according to how it applies to the different knowledge conversion processes. The paper provides a framework for ascertaining the applicability of serious play methods to specific knowledge conversion challenges and identifies under-explored research areas of the serious play field. The fourth research paper (RP4) tests the recommendations of RP3 by applying the LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) method to a knowledge conversion challenge focused on tacit knowledge sharing. It reports on a mixed-methods, multi-session case study in which LSP was used to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue and deliberation about a wicked problem. Results show that LSP is particularly useful in the beginning of a value creation process and that it facilitates socialization and tacit knowledge sharing. Taken together the papers demonstrate the necessity, potential, and application of serious play as a catalyst for the knowledge conversion processes presented in the WoK. It is now clear that different serious play approaches are suitable as respectively: an accelerator for trust-building and collective creativity, as a conduit for iterative innovation, and as a way of making rote tasks more engaging.
ContributorsNørgaard Jensen, Camilla (Author) / Seager, Thomas P (Thesis advisor) / Selin, Cynthia L (Thesis advisor) / Boradkar, Prasad (Committee member) / Giard, Jacques (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
As the desire for innovation increases, individuals and companies seek reliable ways to encourage their creative side. There are many office superstitions about how creativity works, but few are based on psychological science and even fewer have been tested empirically. One of the most prevalent superstitions is the use of objects to inspire creativity or even make a creative room. It is important to test this kind of notion so workplaces can find reliable ways to be innovative, but also because psychology lacks a breadth of literature on how environmental cues interact with people to shape their mental state. This experiment seeks to examine those gaps and fill in the next steps needed for examining at how multiple objects prime creativity. Participants completed two creativity tasks: one for idea generation and one that relies on insight problem solving, the Remote Association Task. There were four priming conditions that relied on objects: a zero object condition, a four neutral (office) objects condition, a single artistic object condition, and finally a four artistic objects condition. There were no differences found between groups for either type of task or in mood or artistic experience. The number of years a participant spent in the United States, however, did correlate with mood, idea generation scores, and insight problem scores. This potentially demonstrates that performance on idea generation and insight tasks rely on the tasks created and culture.
ContributorsJariwala, Shree (Author) / Branaghan, Russell (Thesis advisor) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Committee member) / Song, Hyunjin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
ABSTRACT This narrative study traces the development of a dance curriculum as it unfolded in an inner city public school. It examines the curriculum emergence through intersecting worlds of artistic practice, improvisation, lived experience and context. These worlds were organized and explored through themes of gender, emotion, longing and intersections and examined through lenses of critical theory, aesthetics and currere. It examines the interior dialogue within one individual educator who is both a dance artist and a teacher and reflects the differing and at times conflicting perspectives within those two positions. The curriculum acquired the name "curriculum by accident" because several highly unexpected events contributed to its development. The students were initially suspicious and hostile and presented significant resistance to classical dance as an artistic form. This resistance was circumvented through creative process and improvisation. The act of improvisation became both a way to approach teaching and curriculum development and as an artistic process. Improvisation courts chance, the unplanned and the accidental through a structure in which the unknown is as valued as the known. The school setting is one full of known subjects; curriculum, settings, procedures, people and expectations. Curriculum by accident was a circumstance in which a known (school) and an unknown (the evolving curriculum) melded. The development of curriculum by accident was a response to an array of intuitive and serendipitous cues. The curriculum seeped through the cracks of school experience and transmuted into a curriculum that was very successful.
ContributorsBendix, Susan W. (Author) / Blumenfeld-Jones, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Barone, Thomas (Committee member) / Jackson, Naomi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
Description
This project is a small scale investigation of various factors concerning "Flow" in Piano Performance. "Flow" is the sweet spot where ability and challenge are about equal, and usually high (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). Piano performance is a state of playing the piano with some intent to perform. In this case, the intent is to create something new or improvise. Improvisation is one form of expressive creativity on the piano stemming from some knowledge and extrapolation upon that knowledge (Nachmanovitch 82). Creativity is essential to the development of new music, and though extensive literature exists on both creativity and music independently, there is a gap in research regarding links between the two (Macdonald et al. 2006). This project aims to address some of these gaps by working with piano players and non-musicians of various technical skill levels to examine the "Flow" state in improvisation as well as potential factors affecting creative performance. Factors such as listening, self-confidence, frustration in methodology, and meditation practices were found to correlate positively with technical skill. Participants who completed the practice program were able to reconstruct challenges and enter the "Flow" state in improvisation regardless of high or low technical scores.
ContributorsDorr, Alexander Nathan (Author) / Kaplan, Robert (Thesis director) / Parker, John (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Pain has been found in previous research to have a noticeable effect on people’s ability to perform creative tasks. While limited studies in this field exist, most of this work has focused on convergent thinking through the use of compound remote associates tasks (CRAT). In order to investigate how acute pain might affect divergent creative cognition involving a wider answer space, the current study was conducted using an alternate uses task (AUT) during an algometer-based pain intervention. It was found that acute pain did not have a significant effect on accuracy in the CRAT nor on problem solving abilities in the AUT but notably, participants in the pain condition were more likely to say that they solved problems in the CRAT through insight rather than by an analytical approach. This work demonstrates the need for more research in this field to better understand the relationship between creative cognition and pain.
ContributorsSchmitz, Nicholas (Author) / Brewer, Gene (Thesis director) / Torres, Alexis (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2023-05
Description
Dear reader, I hope you will read this entire dissertation. If you are reluctant because of its length, I invite you to contact me for a conversation instead. Over the past eight years I have been a part of three unfolding histories: colonialism, sustainability science, and the Atlas of Creative Tools (the Atlas). In this dissertation I describe how I am a part of these histories. I advocate for partnering them so that the Atlas is used by people in the field of sustainability science to advance cognitive justice in their work. This advocacy is supported by research conducted using a mixed-methods approach. I combine qualitative methods used to study each of the three histories with the experiential knowledge I gained from being a part of them. Throughout the dissertation I move back and forth between academic research and experiential knowledge. Each informs the other. This back-and-forth movement is itself a method to interrogate the assumptions of dissertation writing. My purposes for doing so are two-fold. I want to honor the dissertation as a form of knowledge production that can promote cognitive justice while also pointing out how it hinders it. Additionally, the back-and-forth interrogation method involves using creative tools from the Atlas in the text itself. This demonstrates how the Atlas can be used to promote cognitive justice while producing knowledge in sustainability science. I structure this dissertation to aid you in four ways. First, I provide a view of sustainability science as a contested space that people can and do use to advance cognitive justice. Second, I write about my research and analysis of the Atlas so that my descriptions can be used right away by other practitioners who are working with the Atlas. Third, my methods for interrogating the dissertation itself are meant to be used, modified, and built on by others. Finally, I hope that the connections I make between the Atlas and sustainability science are helpful for your work, and that they inspire you to try the Atlas and see how you can use it to promote cognitive justice in your own contexts.
ContributorsNock, Matthew (Author) / Haglund, LaDawn (Thesis advisor) / Manuel-Navarrete, David (Thesis advisor) / Lerman, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023