Assessing novel techniques to promote creative cognition: Imaginative recategorization and context-dependent property generation

Abstract

Creativity is often the key to enhancing experience and improving outcomes in professional pursuits and everyday life, however it can be difficult to achieve. A mental set restricts people to considering only standard approaches or obvious aspects of a situation and thereby blocks potential creativity. The present study addresses two novel and relatively lightweight interventions to encourage participants to extend beyond their default concepts of task-relevant objects. Imaginative recategorization invites participants to consider an object in a novel role by considering its potential membership in a familiar category that violates traditional taxonomic status. Context-dependent property generation focuses participants on activating properties of an object that only become obvious when situated in a particular context. Participants were given a short training and then completed the Alternate Uses Task (AUT) and Make a Creature (MAC) creativity tasks with a guided application of each learned technique to problem-relevant objects. In the control condition, participants instead completed a free-association exercise starting from a problem-relevant object before completing the same two creativity tests. The Make a Creature task did not lead to reliable differences, however the AUT showed that imaginative recategorization increased cognitive flexibility, with decreased usefulness of responses. Results reveal the value and limitations of the proposed techniques to break out of mental sets and achieve creative cognition by inviting new pathways between problem-relevant objects, their categorizations, and the inference of category properties.