Speaker
Description
Although the context-embedded nature of creativity has been confirmed by newest theories, laboratory studies cannot easily address it due to a lack of tools for measuring it. Based on the Space-Time continuum theoretical framework (Corazza and Lubart 2021), we modeled the context on two dimensions: the conceptual space in which an action or idea is conceived and the time interval available for idea generation. This exploratory study, aimed to create and examine the effectiveness of a new research paradigm for manipulating the conceptual space. 129 participants (Mage = 29.04±10.38 years) were tested with two main tasks. First, participants were asked to produce concepts associated with a given cues (Free Association Task, FAT: “Write all the concepts you can think of about a [cue]”), contextualized in general, science, and art domains. By manipulating the specificity of the cue, we created four between-subject conditions with the conceptual space hypothetically ranging from very loose (e.g., “science”) to very tight (e.g., “scientific experiment in molecular biology”). Next, all participants performed the Alternative Uses Task (AUT), a classic divergent thinking task for measuring creative performance. ANOVA results (3 domains × 4 conditions) on FAT showed the effect of the condition on the number of concepts given, and post-hoc comparisons indicated that participants under the very tight condition generated less concepts than others. On the contrary, these participants generated more ideas during the AUT. These results showed the effectiveness of the new paradigm in manipulating participants’ conceptual space, which likely also influenced their subsequent AUT performance.
