Effects Of Cognitive Style And Environmental Cues On Creativity

Creativity is a production of an idea or product that is novel,surprising,and compelling.Creativity research was started with to distinguish creative one among general people.Recently researchers come to realize that help to improve the creativity of general people is what creativity research should do.Studies based on brainstorming idea generation showed that working in group advanced the creativity of group members,and they did better in electronic brainstorming group,because the ideas of others as environmental cues had a strong activation effect on the individual's cognition.Electronic brainstorming has unique advantages in stimulating creativity.Therefore,this study applied it comprehensively to three experiments to examine the effects of field dependence-independence cognitive styles and environmental cues on creativity in both social and scientific tasks.Experiment 1 tested the effects of cognitive style and task type on creativity.We used the embedded figures test(EFT)to screened out 20 field-dependent participants and 20 field-independent participants.Each participant completed both social and scientific task.We calculated their creativity in fluency,originality and flexibility.The outcomes showed that:(1)The main effects of cognitive style were significant in all dimensions of creativity.And the creativity of field-independent individuals was higher than field-dependent individuals.(2)The main effect of task type was significant in fluency but not in originality and flexibility.And individuals'fluency in scientific task was higher than in social task.(3)The interactions between cognitive style and task type were not significant in all dimensions.Field-dependent and field-independent individuals had consistent creative differences in social and scientific tasks.Experiment 2 tested the effects of cognitive style and whether there were environmental cues on creativity in scientific task.We screened out 53 field-dependent participants and 54 field-independent participants in the same way.Each participant was randomly involved in experimental conditions of there were no environmental cues or there were environmental cues.We calculated their creativity also from three aspects.The outcomes showed that:(1)The main effects of cognitive style were significant in all dimensions of creativity.And the creativity of field-independent individuals was higher than field-dependent individuals.(2)The main effects of environmental cues were not significant in all dimensions.Environmental cues had no significant impact on individuals'creativity.(3)In originality,there was a significant interaction between cognitive style and environmental cues.When there were no environmental cues field-independent individuals were more creative than field-dependent individuals.But when there were environmental cues frield-dependent individuals were creative in the same way field-dependent individuals were.Experiment 3 tested the effects of cognitive style and environmental cues sources on creati'vity in social task.We screened out 59 field-dependent participants and 64 field-independent participants.Each participant randomly involved in experimental conditions of no environmental cues,generated cues by oneself or accepted input cues.We calculated their creativity from three aspects.The outcome showed that the main effect of cognitive style and environmental cues sources in each dimension of creativity was not significant.And the interaction between the two was not significant.This study helped to further understand how cognitive style and environmental cues affect social creativity and scientific creativity.These findings suggested that we should provide field-dependent individuals environmental cues to improve their creativity.As same time,it was necessary to explore other ways to improve the creativity of field-independent individuals.