Consequences Of Creative Thinking

FORGETTING AS AN CONSEQUENCE AND ENABLER OF CREATIVE THINKING

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION

Mental fixation is generally defined as something that blocks or impedes the successful completion of a cognitive operation, which can occur in contexts such as remembering, solving problems, or generating creative ideas. The strengthening of semantic, phonological, or episodic associations can cause fixation by interfering with, or otherwise preventing access to, target associations. Functional fixedness and Einstellung provide perfect examples of how old ways of thinking can interfere with new ways of thinking. Functional fixedness refers to the tendency for people to become fixated by the traditional use of an item (Duncker, 1945; Maier, 1931), and Einstellung

Thus, when existing information and associations cause fixation, it would be useful to have some mechanism by which to cause that information and those associations to become less accessible, without having to wait for them to be forgotten. One such mechanism may be that of inhibition. In the context of creative thinking, inhibition may provide a means by which to select against the information and associations causing fixation, rendering them less accessible in memory and thus less likely to interfere with the generation of creative thoughts and

Just as the act of retrieval has been argued to modify memory, so might be the act of thinking. Whenever information in memory interferes with some thinking process, that information may be targeted by an inhibitory process that acts to render it less accessible. In this way, thinking may serve to update our memories in the same way that retrieval does, making information that is no longer less recallable, and thus creating access to information that is more likely to b useful.

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

The statement of problem for this experiment is that, ‘whether forgetting will induce creative thinking?’

HYPOTHESIS

The hypothesis of this experiment states that the generated uses will be better recalled than the given uses.

INDEPENDENT VARIABLE

The independent variable (IV) of this experiment is the presentation of items. This IV has 2 levels. They are:

1. Items presented in the baseline condition.

2. Items presented in the experimental condition.

DEPENDENT VARIABLE

The dependent variable (DV) of this experiment is the number of correct responses in the final recall test.

CONTROLS

DESIGN

The experimental design uses here is the repeated measures design because only one participant is exposed to both the levels of the independent