The Effect Of Example Feature And Activation Mode On Creative Idea Generation

Creative idea generation is an essential feature of human psychology. Example is one of the external hints and it has remarkably impact on creative thinking. Recently, some research have explored the relationship between creative thinking and example type. However, there are still many inconsistencies. For example, the phenomenon that creative example can’t stimulate the individual’s creative idea generation remains to be discussed in theoretical and empirical studies. According to the observational learning theory, we think the reason that creative example may not motivate idea generation under certain conditions is related to the level of knowledge activation and activation time of observers. By this, our study was meant to explore the impact that different originality level of examples on creative idea generation, which in the condition of different knowledge activation modes and activation time.In our study, there were three experiments. In Experiments 1, participants were 49 college students and they were divided into two groups randomly. This experiment adopted a 2 (Semantic association group, Subtraction operation group) X 2 (Creative example, Common example) mixed design and our focus was on the influence of associative-activation and the originality level of example on creative idea generation. In Experiments 2, there were 43 participants and this experiment adopted a 2 (2min, 15s)×2 (Creative example, Common example) mixed design and our focus was on the influence of time and the originality level of example on creative idea generation. In Experiments 3, there were 68 participants and this experiment adopted a 3 (Activation mode:association activation group, character activation group and non-concept domain group) X 2 (Example type:creative example and common example) mixed design and our focus was on the influence of activation modes and the originality level of example on creative idea generation.The results were as follows:(1) Participants in creative example group had better performance than common example group on originality in both the activation of semantic association and subtraction operation; (2) After the presentation of example, in the condition of 15 seconds activation, participants in common example group had better performance on the originality than that in creative example group; in the condition of 2 minutes, participants in creative example group had better performance on the originality than that in common example group; compared to 15 seconds, the condition of 2 minutes can effectively stimulate the original ideas. (3)In the condition of 2 minutes, participants in creative example had better performance than common example group in both originality and fluency of creative idea generation; (4)Compared to the character activation, association activation can promote participants to generate creative ideas more.According to the research results, we can conclude two basic conclusions:(1) the promotion of creative example to creative idea generation is conditional. And it needs enough time to activate related-knowledge; (2) the different activation modes of knowledge had different effects on the role of the example played in creative idea generation. By contrast, association activation can enhance the positive effects of creative example on creative idea generation more than other modes.Theoretically, the results of this study can help us further understand the effects of creative example on creative idea generation and also can provide some reference for future research; from the perspective of practice, the results try to provide some insights about how to effectively use examples to stimulate the individuals’ creativity.