Investigating individual differences in creativity and the extraction of meaning

Background

Creativity depicts the human capacity to produce useful and novel ideas, which involves transforming existing objects into different designs/uses. The experience of a conceptual re-definition and re-construction of the original problem space is often referred to as the occurrence of insight. The “Aha” moment often arises when problem solvers report to find the solution, it is commonly seen as the affective component or the phenomenology of insight.

Research Questions / Hypotheses

People who are higher in positive schizotypy will have higher aha rating in Bridge the Associative Gap Task than Alternative Uses Task than Compound Remote Associate tasks. Positive schizotypy will be positively related to aha in Bridge the Associative Gap Task and Alternative Uses Task but not Compound Remote Associate tasks. When not looking at positive schizotypy, if Compound Remote Associate tasks have high completion rate, Compound Remote Associate tasks will have higher aha rating than Bridge the Associative Gap Task than Alternative Uses Task.

Participants

We received 114 responses in total.

Methods

The verbal tasks include Compound Remote Associate tasks, Bridge-an-Associative-Gap task, and Alternative Uses Task. The survey include demographical questions and a short-form O-LIFE questionnaire measuring Schizotypy. Participants also need to complete a stimulus-noise measure that combines the image task and audio tasks. There is also self-rating scale of feelings of "aha" and "confidence" after each problem across different tasks.

Results

The researchers will score the originality and appropriateness of the answers given by each participant manually. Statistical analyses will be conducted using R. Differences in aha and confidence rating will be investigated using ANOVAs.

Implications

The occurrence of Aha during problem-solving is associated with the perceived accuracy of the solution. People who are high in positive schizotypy will also have high level of divergent thinking but not necessarily convergent thinking.