Serena Mastria, Sergio Agnoli, G. E. Corazza, M. Grassi, Laura Franchin
{"title":"What inspires us? An experimental analysis of the semantic meaning of irrelevant information in creative ideation","authors":"Serena Mastria, Sergio Agnoli, G. E. Corazza, M. Grassi, Laura Franchin","doi":"10.1080/13546783.2022.2132289","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Past research showed that apparently irrelevant information for a creative task at hand can lead to higher creative performance, especially in open-minded individuals. Through two diverse experimental procedures, the present work investigated which type of irrelevance information can inspire (i.e., increase) the creative performance during a divergent thinking (DT) task and how open-minded individuals can be inspired by this kind of information. In Experiment 1, the attentional processing of information that was either apparently relevant or irrelevant for the execution of a verbal DT task was assessed by means of an eye-tracking methodology. In Experiment 2, creative performance was explored through a verbal priming paradigm, which forcedly introduced apparently irrelevant information during the DT task. In both experiments, the level of irrelevance was operationalized in terms of semantic distance between the different kind of information. Results from both experiments highlighted the role of the semantic meaning of the irrelevant information as one of the main determinants, along with Openness, of inspiration (i.e., enhancement) of the creative performance.","PeriodicalId":2,"journal":{"name":"ACS Applied Bio Materials","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.6000,"publicationDate":"2022-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"5","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ACS Applied Bio Materials","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13546783.2022.2132289","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"MATERIALS SCIENCE, BIOMATERIALS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 5
Abstract
Abstract Past research showed that apparently irrelevant information for a creative task at hand can lead to higher creative performance, especially in open-minded individuals. Through two diverse experimental procedures, the present work investigated which type of irrelevance information can inspire (i.e., increase) the creative performance during a divergent thinking (DT) task and how open-minded individuals can be inspired by this kind of information. In Experiment 1, the attentional processing of information that was either apparently relevant or irrelevant for the execution of a verbal DT task was assessed by means of an eye-tracking methodology. In Experiment 2, creative performance was explored through a verbal priming paradigm, which forcedly introduced apparently irrelevant information during the DT task. In both experiments, the level of irrelevance was operationalized in terms of semantic distance between the different kind of information. Results from both experiments highlighted the role of the semantic meaning of the irrelevant information as one of the main determinants, along with Openness, of inspiration (i.e., enhancement) of the creative performance.