The Influence Of Unconscious Thought On Creative Problem Solving

Insight is the one of ways to solve creative problem. Researchers in China, Zhang Qinglin put forward the theory of prototype elicitation in recent years. The theory suggests that insight has two stages, namely, “prototype activation” and “heuristic information”. “Prototype activation” is an automatic process while "heuristic information" belongs to the process of controlled processing, failed to explain in the processes of "prototype activation" and "heuristic information", the effect of interruption of problem solving. In the creative problem solving process, both insight and unconscious thought(UT) are scholars focus, however many studies tried to explain insight from the perspective of consciousness and some of them emphasized the role of unconsciousness, but the interruption of problem solving(UT) was still ignored. Recently the Dutch psychologist Dijksterhuis proposed the Unconscious Thought Theory, UTT, suggesting Conscious thought(CT) is suitable for solving simple problems while the UT is good at dealing with complex problems. To find the effect of UT, based on the prototype elicitation paradigm, this study examined insight from a new angle, UTT.Based on the research paradigms of the previous prototype activation, this study adopted modified experiment paradigms and chose experiment material from “The Material Library of Scientific Invention Experiments”, using two experiments to explore the effect of UT on creative problem solving. The results are as follows:(1). UT exerted prompting effects on creative problems, especially which were more demanding on creativity. To the problem which were more demanding on creativity UT group problem solving accuracy(M = 0.59) is significantly higher than the CT group(M = 0.33) and the immediate group(M = 0.26).(2). In difficult problem, when individual thinks consciously "inspired" problem and knowledge, many times "UT" can improve the creative problem solving. Secondary distractions(UT) studies have shown that "UT(first)-UT(again) group" problem solving accuracy(M = 0.62) is significantly higher than "conscious-conscious thought group"(M = 0.37), "conscious-unconscious thought group"(M = 0.54), and "unconscious- conscious thought group"(M = 0.32).