Contradictions and competing demands are common in everyday problems. To address these problems, individuals need to both recognize and integrate these contradictions during problem-solving to find creative solutions. We propose that recognition and integration take place in the problem construction phase of the creative problem-solving process.…

Idea evaluation is a critical activity in the creative process due to its role in making a decision about what idea(s) should be developed further and implemented, or whether more ideas should be generated. Confidence in the correctness of the evaluation plays a key role in making that decision. Emerging evidence suggests that inner speaking, the…

This research explored the relationship between mental fatigue and creativity by testing the creative potential of 25 Keene State College students, half of which were subjected to mental fatigue. Little research has been done to look at these 2 variables together, but considerable research has been done on them individually. Using an…

The effect of napping versus wakefulness was studied on primed and repeated Remote Associate Tests (RATs) and on divergent creativity tests. The participants were 42 students from the USA, studying international courses at a Swedish university. The hypotheses for the RATs were (1), when the correct answers were primed before the nap, the RAT…

Although research from a range of fields indicates the importance of innovation for progress in those fields, there is not yet a set of best practices for promoting insights that lead to scientific innovation. This article proposes and tests the hypothesis that function-construction maps based on prototype and heuristic theory lead to increased…

Evidence from a range of fields shows that representation-connection (RC) is the key step towards the solution of a real-world insight problem. However, no study has focused on the inter-individual variability in RC, and little is known about whether structural and resting-state functional signals can account for inter-individual differences in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the influences of sibling constellation (sex and birth order) on creativity in the context of China's one-child policy (OCP) and Confucian culture (e.g., preference for male offspring). Participants were recruited from a public university in east China and were asked to complete 2 divergent thinking tests,…

Studies on whether fixation cues provided in the first episode of divergent thinking tasks influence creative outcomes after incubation, as they do for convergent problem-solving tasks, remain limited. This research examined the beneficial effects of incubation using the delayed- and immediate-incubation paradigms. Participants in Experiment 1…

Although many anecdotes suggest that creative insights often arise during mind wandering, empirical research is still sparse. In this study, the number reduction task (NRT) was used to assess whether insightful solutions were related to mind wandering during the incubation stage of the creative process. An experience sampling paradigm was used to…

Recent findings in creativity research suggest that how creativity is operationalized may have a profound influence on theories of creative production. In this study, two paradigms--divergent thinking and creative problem solving--were compared on several indices of creativity while keeping the problem constant. Participants were students from a…

Creativity is commonly assessed using divergent thinking tasks, which measure the fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of participant output on a variety of different tasks. This study assesses the degree to which creativity can be identified based on linguistic features of participants' language while completing collaborative…

In this study, novel and old scientific innovations (NSI and OSI) were selected as materials to explore the electrophysiological correlates of scientific innovation induced by heuristic information. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to do so, college students solved NSI problems (for which they did not know the answers) and OSI problems…

College students (N=135) were presented with novel, ill-defined problems and asked to select concepts they thought would help solve the problems. The use of concepts organized around long-term goals was positively related to indices of solution quality and originality. (DB)