Full metadata
Title
Oppositional processes in divergent thinking
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.
Date Created
2017
Contributors
- Xu, Dongchen (Author)
- Brewer, Gene (Thesis advisor)
- Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member)
- Homa, Donald (Committee member)
- Goldinger, Stephen (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
Resource Type
Extent
vi, 73 pages : illustrations
Language
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.45037
Statement of Responsibility
by Dongchen Xu
Description Source
Viewed on January 17, 2018
Level of coding
full
Note
Partial requirement for: Ph. D., Arizona State University, 2017
Note type
thesis
Includes bibliographical references (pages 71-73)
Note type
bibliography
Field of study: Psychology
System Created
- 2017-08-01 08:02:13
System Modified
- 2021-08-26 09:47:01
- 2 years 7 months ago
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