Creativity Flashcards
Do creative people have special mental capacities?
No! The essence of creativity is using standard cognitive representations in idiosyncratic ways, and not using idiosyncratic cognitive representations.
Explain how historiometric studies have been used to study creativity, and some difficulties they face.
Historiometric studies focus on the personal, social, cultural and political conditions that affect the creativity of eminent people.
It looks at the background of these people, and aims to find a link that could explain their creativity.
However, it is usually restrospective, and there are only a small subset of potential candidates.
How did Sternberg’s three facet model of creativity begin?
Results of a survey sent to people from all walks of life indicated that:
-There are six dimensions that are required to account for creativity, and they are not the same as the ones for intelligence and wisdom.
The six dimensions are
- Lack conventionality
- Motivated and focused
- Have perspicacity
- Possess aesthetic taste and imagination
- Have decision making skills and flexibility
- Integrate and intellectualise
What does Sternberg’s three facet model of creativity entail?
It is a confluence of intelligence, personality and “cognitive style”.
What does Philip Johnson-Laird argue regarding acts of creation.
Acts of creation yield a product with three essential properties
- The result is formed from existing elements, but the combination is novel for the individual
- Creativity satisfies pre-existing criteria.
- Creativity is not determiend by rote, but embodies a freedom of choice.
Describe Mednick and Mednick’s Remote Association Test.
Tested ability of people to come up with words that had remote semantic associations with provided words.
Describe how common word associations were used to test creativity.
Tested people’s abiltity to find words that linked a set of seemingly unassociated words.
Explain Torrance(1968). What are some potential measures of performance?
Given an unusual situation and asked to come up to potential consequences.
- Number of answers
- Originality of answers
- How useful the answers are
- Flexibility of solutions
- Elaborations
Explain Hofstadter’s analogy-making task, and discuss what analogy-making involves.
Gave participants incomplete analogies and told them to fill in the gaps.
Analogy-making can be seen as :
- High level perception
- Conceptualisation and Categorisation
- The ability to relax concept and category membership,
Describe Hofstadter’s microworld
Shown how a string has been changed into another string. Asked to change your own string based on the given pattern.
Define analogical reasoning
Analogical reasoning can be defined as “distilling the essence” of one situation and adapting it via conceptual slippage to another situation.
Define conceptual slippage
A concept contributed to by both System 1 and System 2.
- Recognition of whole from isolated parts.
- Describing objects an appropriate level of abstraction
- Organization of the subject into groups
- Seeing relevant differences between groups
- Evaluating and selecting among available options.
Explain the Geneplore Model of Creativity
For Finke et al. creavitiy is:
the emergence of natural cognitive representations and processes in System 1
subjected to continous regeneration and reexploration ins System 2.
Such opereations may be subject to external constraints and internal critiera.
Explain the Geneplore Microworld, as well as briefly mention results.
Subjects have to use 3 components to build something creative, or useful.
The object had to belong to one of 8 categories.
- Condition 1: Choose components, category restrained
- Condition 2: Choose category, object restrained
- Condition 3 : Both constrained
The condition that was most restrained(condition 3) produced the most creative builds.
