The Effect Of Diversity And Activation Depth Of Knowledge On Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is a process to produce ideas that is both novel and appropriate, which largely affected by individual’s knowledge. Research has also shown that activation level of prior knowledge have important influence on the idea generation process. However, there isn’t much empirical research on the question that how the diversity and activation depth of knowledge affect the novelty of creative thinking. The present study was designed to explore the effect of the breadth and depth of knowledge activation on the creative thinking by two experiments.In study1, participants are136sixth grade school students and they are divided into six groups randomly. This experiment adopts a between-subject design and investigates the effect of stimulation properties (text, pictures and text with picture) and relatedness (related and unrelated) on story generation in order to study the influence of multi-domain knowledge on creative thinking.In study2, participants are68eighth grade school students and they are divided into three groups randomly. This experiment use different instruction to guide the students draw concept map as a tool for prior knowledge activation and then all the participants conduct the story generation task. This study aims to explore the effect of increasing activation depth of knowledge on creative thinking.The study result showed:(1) The relatedness of words have main effect on the story generation, which means the combination of diversity knowledge can improve creative thinking. The inclusion of unrelated words in the story improves the creativity of the outcomes;(2) The stimulation properties have no significant effect on the creative story generation. There isn’t significant difference on creativity between the generated stories by different groups;(3) The structure of concept map reflect individual’s knowledge network and activation degree to some extent. The one who has more hierarchies in concept map explores deeper in the given domain;(4) The knowledge base and activation degree affect the creation. The lack of knowledge base in a given domain would easily lead to fixation. Thus, the creativity of the outcome will lower when the individual explores deeper in a domain.Above all, this study shows that the diversity of knowledge can improve the creativity of idea generation to some extent. Creativity benefits from the increasing breadth of idea generation. However, the increasing depth of idea generation may lead to fixation and decrease creativity.