The Effect Of Concept Mapping Priming On Verbal Creativity

Creativity is defined as the ability to produce product or idea that is novel and useful.According to the SIAM(Search for Ideas In Associative Memory)model,knowledge activation is an essential process of creative idea generation.Some researchers indicated that,concept mapping can enhance the breadth and depth of knowledge activation,thus lead individuals engage in more complex,flexible,and creative thinking processes.Preliminary study have shown that concept mapping ability has a positive relationship with verbal creativity.So can the concept map,as an knowledge activation tool,promote the performance of verbal creativity?If the answer is yes,which element of concept mapping ability is more crucial?And,what is the underlying cognitive mechanism?These are the basic research questions of the present study.This study consists of three parts.Part one includes study 1 and study 2,which mainly investigate the effect of diffenrent knowledge activation conditions(free retrieval,concept mapping)on the performance of story generation and title generation.Story generation involves the interaction of divergent and convergent thinking,while title generation mainly calls for divergent thinking.The results of study 1 showed that,there were no significant differences in fluency,originality and logicality of story generation between the two knowledge activation condition.The results of study 2 revealed that,compared with the free retrieval condition,participants generated more story titles under the condition of concept mapping.The results of study 1 and study 2 showed that,as a knowledge activation tool,concept mapping priming was more effective when the creativity task mainly involves divergent thinking process.Therefore,part two(study 3,study 4,and study 5)employed the widely used verbal divergent thinking task:Alternative Uses Task(AUT),to examine the effect and underlying cognitive mechanism of concept mapping priming on verbal divergent thinking.Study 3 explored the relationship between concept mapping ability and AUT performance.The results showed that,there were significant correlations among crosslink and AUT fluency/uniqueness,as well as a marginally significant association between crosslink and Top2 originality.Study 4 asked participants to complete AUT under three knowledge activation condition:reading comprehension,constructing a concept map with crosslinks,and constructing a concept map without crosslinks,thus to explore whether crosslink has particular contribution on AUT performance.The results showed that,compared with the reading condition and no crosslink concept mapping condition,participants scored higher in AUT fluency,uniqueness and Top2 originality when under the crosslink concept mapping condition.From the perspective of semantic association,Study 5 investigated the underlying cognitive mechanism of the relationship between crosslink and AUT performance.The results showed,crosslink were significantly associated with dissociative ability;more importantly,dissociative ability fully mediated the effect of crosslink on AUT fluency.Many studies revealed that,exposure to other people's ideas could stimulate individual's creative idea generation.This indicates,instead of constructing concept maps by oneself,presenting individuals with other people's concept maps could also serve as a knowledge activation method.Part three includes study 6a and study 6b,which further investigate the association between crosslink and verbal divergent thinking using eye-tracking technology.Study 6a compared participants' AUT performance after memorizing two kinds of concept map(with or without crosslink).The results revealed that,participants generated more uses after memorizing concept maps with crosslink.Additionally,participants'fixation time on crosslinks was significantly associated with AUT fluency and Top2 originality.Study 6b adopted two sets of crosslinks varying in originality(one set is original,while the other set is common),and asked participants to generate unusual uses while watching the concept map.The results showed that,participants' fixation count on original crosslinks was significantly associated with their AUT performance.In contrast,participants' fixation count on common crosslinks or other areas of concept map were not associated with their AUT performance.In conclusion,as a knowledge activation tool,the effect of concept mapping priming on verbal creativity was influenced by two factors:the thinking process of creativity tasks(divergent or convergent)and participants' knowledge base of creativity tasks.Compared with story generation,concept mapping priming can more effectively promote individual's performance in verbal divergent thinking(i.e.,title generation,AUT).Among the four indices(proposition,hierarchy,crosslink,and example)of concept mapping ability,crosslink demonstrates a stably positive association with AUT performance.Furthermore,the more crosslinks participants generated in concept mapping,the more semantic distant concepts they could retrieve.This indicates,crosslinks probably facilitate verbal divergent thinking performance through affecting the remote association process.In addtion,original crosslink can induce participants to generate more creative ideas than common crosslink.