A Study On The Mechanism Of The Impact Of Reward On The Puzzle Problem Solving

Creativity plays a vital role in today’s world, improving individual creativity has become the very important goal of various organizations. In multitudinous ways to improve creative potential, many researchers has focused on rewards and carried out extensive studies about the way that rewards affect creativity. Despite a considerable literature, the question of whether rewards enhance or hinder creativity remains controversial (Hennessey,2003).Three experiments was designed and conducted to explore the problem. All the participants were undergraduates or postgraduates came from a Normal University, and three experiments had different subjects. Combining Monetary Incentive Delay Test and logogriph problems in order to explore how expected reward as a kind of motivation factor influence insight problem solving in the form of a "top-down". This research can contribute to indicate the relationship between rewards and insight further, deepen the understanding of interaction between motivation and cognition, rich previous studies about motivation affect creativity and its basic theory, provide more perspective for future researches. Meanwhile, as an excellent supplement for insight research it reveal the situational variables which can promote to solve logogriph problems.Study 1 was made up of two experiments:experiment 1 and experiment 2. In experiment 1, we adopted insight problem solving process as research object, used Monetary Incentive Delay Test, by means of the manipulation of cues type to realize manipulation of expected reward, investigating the influence of the strength of expected reward on different difficult logogriph problems. In experiment 2, we shortened response time of subjects in order to improve test difficulty, added " no expected reward " condition. Study 1 shows that:expected reward as a widely used means of incentive has great influence on individual insight test performance. The strength of expected reward and task difficulty were all influence factors of the relationship between expected reward and insight. To be specific, expected rewards promoted insight problem solving; when in the high expected reward condition, expected rewards hindered insight. At the same time, the affect of expected reward only limited in low difficult task, it has almost no effect of high difficult task.Study 2 payed attention to the modulation effect of reward sensitivity on the relationship between insight and expected rewards, we used Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Short Form Scale(EPQ-RS) to select extroverts and introverts. The results proved that extroverts and introverts had different level of reward sensitivity, the reward sensitivity difference modulate the relationship between expected reward and insight, that is the creativity performance of extroverts were strongly influenced by the expected reward.