Conceptual priming in a generative problem-solving task

Three experiments explored how participants solved a very open-ended genera tive problem-solving task. Previous research has shown that when participan ts are shown examples, novel creations will tend to conform to features sha red across those examples (Smith, Ward, & Schumacher, 1993). We made the sh ared features of the examples conceptually related to one another. We found that when the features were related to the concept of hostility, participa nts' creations contained hostile features that were not part of any of the examples. These results suggest that participants will design novel entitie s to be consistent with emergent properties of examples shown to them. We a lso found that a mild hostility prime from unscrambling sentences had a sim ilar conceptual effect. Together, the two effects suggest that conceptual p riming of generative cognitive tasks will influence the cognitive aspects o f the creative process.