The Effect Of Similarity Between Distraction Tasks And Experimental Tasks On Processing Results Of Unconscious Thinking

In traditional view,thought as a higher cognitive activity of human beings,belongs to conscious category.But studies have shown that thought can take place not only in the unconscious,but also in the solution of some complex problems,the processing result of unconscious thought is superior to conscious thought.The study of unconscious thought has broken the traditional idea,that hard thinking leads to good results.And the study of unconscious thought has become one of the hot issues in the field of social cognition research.The researchers in this field not only verified the existence of unconscious thought through a series of experiments,but also extended the advantage effect of unconscious thought to the field of creative problem-solving.Studies have shown that distraction task time and difficulty,and big letters of Navon task can affect creative problem solving.However,the influence of the similarity between unconscious distraction tasks and experimental tasks on creative problem-solving is not addressed.Therefore,the present study adopts the unconscious thought paradigm,aiming to discuss whether the similarity between distraction task and experimental task will affect creative problem solving.The present study consists of three experiments.In Experiment 1,we first presented subjects with verbal creative tasks.Then,the subjects were randomly divided into three groups.For the first group,they were required to complete the 3minute reading task(similar task unconscious thought group);for the second group,they were required to complete the rotation task(dissimilar task unconscious thought group);for the third group,the subjects were asked to think carefully for 3 minutes(conscious thought group).Finally,the subjects answered in a given time.The experimental results show that under the condition of dissimilar tasks,the performance of the unconscious thought group was better.Experiment 2 changed the distraction task and used verbal and spatial working memory tasks.The experimental results show that compared with the subjects under similar task conditions,the answers of the subjects under the conditions of dissimilar tasks are more creative.Experiment 3 changed the experimental task and used space creative tasks to further verify that under the condition of dissimilar tasks,the performance of the unconscious thought group was better.Based on the above three experiments,this study shows thatwhen distracted tasks are different from experimental tasks,unconscious thought has better effect in solving creative problems.