CREO publie une étude sur l’impact des exemples sur la créativité

Le laboratoire a publié un nouvel article scientifique dans Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. L’article porte sur l’impact des exemples sur le processus créatif.

Exposure to examples of varying degrees of originality may impact creative thinking differently, resulting in either a fixation or a stimulation effect. These effects can be interpreted from an associative (bottom-up) or an executive (top-down) perspective. In this preregistered study, we examined the cognitive correlates of exposing participants to different types of examples in a divergent thinking task. A total of 365 participants completed three alternate uses tasks (AUTs) while exposed to either a closely associated (common) or a more remote example (original). Subjective cognitive loadwas reported for each AUT trial and participants completed three tasks measuring fluid intelligence (Gf ). Consistent with our preregistered predictions, exposure to relatively more remote examples led to higher originality and cognitive load but marginally lower fluency than exposure to closely associated examples. Mediation analysis revealed that cognitive load fully mediated the impact of examples on fluency and partially mediated the effect on originality. When individual differences in Gf were considered, only participants with lower cognitive potential had the originality of their ideas impacted by example types. This study suggests that the effect of different types of examples on creative ideation should be understood as the interplay between associative and executive processes.