The Influences Of Level Of Processing On Individual's Creative Performance

The previous study explored a lot to improve the performance of individual creativity.These researches started from the specificity of creative task,improved the instruction of "be creative" and changed the way of presenting samples to the subjects in the experiment.However,the conclusions reached were inconsistent.The present study explains the inconsistencies from the perspective of information processing,investigates the influence of level of processing on individual creative performance,especially novelty performance,and provides empirical evidence from the level of processing in individual creative performance.This paper consists of 3 formal experiments,which verify whether improving the level of processing can promote the individual creative performance by changing the individual processing level of the task instructions,the presented worked samples and the objects to be created.Creative performance was measured by the scores of the four dimensions,including fluency,flexibility,objective novelty and subjective novelty of the AUT task,with special attention paid to the novelty performance.Experiment 1 involves the individual processing of task instructions.Two kinds of processing level instructions are adopted to investigate the influence of the processing level of instructions on the individual's creative performance.Among them,the instruction of low processing level only suggested that the participants should be creative(1a).Based on the instruction of "be creative",the instruction of high processing level presented 4 samples(2 highly creative samples,2 regular samples)to the participants,and gave the creativity scores of experts on the samples at the same time(1b).The results showed that the scores of subjective novelty and objective novelty in the high-processing-level instruction group were significantly higher than those in the low-processing-level instruction group,but the scores of fluency were lower than those in the low-processing-level instruction group.And there is no significant difference between these two group.Experiment 2 involves the processing of worked samples by participants.Two sample processing levels are adopted to investigate the influence of sample processing levels on individual creative performance.At low sample processing level,only 2highly creative samples were presented to the participants(2a).The high level of sample processing required the participants to independently score the creativity of the 4 presented samples(2 highly creative samples,2 regular samples)and explain the reasons(2b).The results showed that the scores of subjective novelty and objective novelty in the sample group with high processing level were significantly higher than those of the sample group with low processing level,and there was no significant difference in the scores of fluency and flexibility between the two groups.Experiment 3 involves the pre-processing of creative tasks.Two kinds of pre-processing levels are set to investigate the influence of the target items' processing level on the individual's innovative performance.The low pre-processing level required the participants to classify irrelevant items before the divergent thinking task(3a).The high level of pre-processing required the participants to classify the target items before the divergent thinking task(3b).The results showed that the scores of subjective novelty and objective novelty of the participants in the high-level pre-processing group were higher than those in the low-level pre-processing group,and there was no significant difference in the scores of fluency and flexibility between the two groups.The number of categories generated in the pre-processing task positively predicted the fluency and flexibility of the individual in the subsequent divergent thinking task,regardless of whether the classified items were related to the target items in the subsequent divergent thinking task.Combine the above experiments,further investigation of two kinds of high level of sample processing group(1b & 2b)compared with low level of sample processing group of novelty in the ascending individual(2a)the effect on performance,the results show that the novelty scores of high level of sample processing groups(1b &2b)were significantly higher than low level of sample processing group(2a),however the examples + expert evaluation(1b)are better than examples+ independent evaluation(2b)on effect of individual novelty promotion.In general,all the experiments support the hypothesis that high level of processing can improve individual creative performance,especially novelty performance.According to the above findings,we can get the following enlightenment:(1)it is not enough to suggest that participants to be creative.Only high level processing of the instruction "be creative" of the divergent task can improve the individual's creative performance;(2)when improving individuals' innovative performance through sample processing,the processing level of samples should be improved by presenting both highly creative samples and regular samples to individuals,as well as the scores of experts on samples at the same time,so as to generate more novel schemes;(3)high level of pre-processing before the creative task can improve the individual's creative performance and generate more novel solutions.