Journal
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 26, Issue 9, Pages 1461-1468Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0956797615591863
Keywords
episodic-specificity induction; episodic memory; creativity; divergent thinking; convergent thinking; imagination
Categories
Funding
- National Institute of Mental Health [MH060941]
- National Institute on Aging [AG08441]
- Rutherford Discovery Fellowship [RDF-10-UOA-024]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
People produce more episodic details when imagining future events and solving means-end problems after receiving an episodic-specificity inductionbrief training in recollecting details of a recent eventthan after receiving a control induction not focused on episodic retrieval. Here we show for the first time that an episodic-specificity induction also enhances divergent creative thinking. In Experiment 1, participants exhibited a selective boost on a divergent-thinking task (generating unusual uses of common objects) after a specificity induction compared with a control induction; by contrast, performance following the two inductions was similar on an object association task thought to involve little divergent thinking. In Experiment 2, we replicated the specificity-induction effect on divergent thinking using a different control induction, and also found that participants performed similarly on a convergent-thinking task following the two inductions. These experiments provide novel evidence that episodic memory is involved in divergent creative thinking.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available