The Factors Which Affect Stimulation Effect Of External Stimuli On Idea Generation In Creativity Support System

Idea generation is a process that people generate many alternative solutions of problem,in which people may generate creative ideas.One of the many factors that affect idea generation is external stimuli.As external cues,these stimuli could activate related knowledge in problem solvers' semantic network.And thes activated knowledge may combine with question,leading to the generation of new idea.With the development of information technology,some computer-based tools,a kind of creativity support system(CSS),have been developed to collect and provide stimuli in order to support idea generation.However,as a kind of tools based on technique,few research has applied new computer algorithm to improve availability of these tools.More important is that idea generation is a cognitive process,so that in environment of CSS,some features of the tool may affect user's performance cognitively.Therefore,this study will focus on two questions:1.disign and implement a more available method of constructing creativity support system,which take advantage of new algorithm;2.propose factors which may affect idea generation in CSS based on psychological model of idea generation and conduct experiments to examine them.Study 1 designed an algorithm of cue words retrieval based on natural language processing,which applied vector space model to calculate similarity between words.At the same time,manual analysis of the question was conducted to improve the performance of the algorithm.A creativity support system was developed based on a knowledge base constituted of words obtained from the algorithm.Then an experiment was conducted to examine the effect of the system,and the result shows the retrieved cue words could stimulate idea generation.Study 2 investigated the effect of different cue access modes.In the first mode,subjects could press button to request for cues whenever they need;in the second mode,subjects could only get cues when they submit an answer or type nothing within 10 seconds.The study found that in the first mode,people could make full use of cues to generate ideas,leading to more ideas.And in this mode,when ideas were generated based on cues,they were more original.Study 3 examined the effect of the semantic distance between cue words and question on idea generation.The knowledge base in studyl was classified into different clusters according to the semantic distance to question by manual assessment.In this study,performance of idea generation when remote distance words were cues was compared with that when moderate distance words were cues.The result shows that the moderate distance words have more stimulation effect on idea generation.In moderate distance condition,more ideas were inspired by cues and these ideas were more original when compared to those inspired by remote distance cues.In general,this research solved two problems:1.implement semi-automatic construction of knowledge base in creativity support system by natural language processing algorithm;2.confirm 2 design principles of the systems which stimulate idea generation by providing exteneral stimuli:first,in the way of stimuli obtaining,users should have control of the stimuli;second,in the constitution of knowledge base,moderate semantic distance knowledge materials should account for higher proportion.