Effects Of An Episodic-Specificity Induction On Creativity: Task And Gender Differences

Several previous studies have suggested that episodic memory may contribute to aspects of creative thinking.For example,Duff reported that patients with bilateral hippocampal lesions,who exhibit severe impairments of episodic memory,also exhibit impairments on a widely used battery of creativity tasks,the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking(TTCT).Some fMRI studies found consistent results.Benedek revealed that brain regions typically associated with episodic memory,including the hippocampus,show increased activity when participants performed Alternate Uses Task(AUT).In addition,Schacter designed a new paradigm — episodic specificity induction and found that an episodic specificity induction enhances divergent creative thinking on the alternate uses task(AUT)in young adults.But based on Schacter's study,we don't know whether there are gender differences on this effect and the generalizability of these results to other tasks.In present study,we examined whether the effects of an episodic specificity induction would extend to a different task of divergent thinking,the TTCT task.In addition,we examined whether there are gender differences.The current study of 21 male students and 20 female again found significantly main effects of episodic specificity induction on fluency,flexibility and originality score.More important,we found that there are significantly interaction effects among the three factors on fluency and flexibility score(F=6.647,p<0.05;F=4.475,p<0.05)and we found significantly interaction effect between gender and induction methods on originality(F=16.632,p<0.01).Meanwhile,we separate analyses the correlation among all the index of the same task and the different task in the condition of episodic specificity induction and impression induction that we found under the condition of control,the correlation of all index in the same task is significantly bigger than the correlation of all index in the different task,however,under the condition of episodic specificity induction,the correlation of all index in the different task is significantly bigger than the correlation of all index in the same task.Together,these results finally matched the results of Schacter.On the other hand,the research had expanded Schacter's results to TTCT.In the end,the research hasfound that episodic specificity induction can improve the correlation among all the index in the two kind of tasks.