PROCESS-BASED MEASURES OF CREATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING SKILLS .4. CATEGORY COMBINATION

Many studies suggest that the combination and reorganization of extant knowledge structures may play an important role in creative thought. Little evidence is available, however, suggesting that performance on tasks where people are asked to combine and reorganize categories is r elated to creative thinking. Further, it is unclear how people go abou t combining and reorganizing diverse categories. In this study, 112 un dergraduates were asked to work on a set of category combination probl ems. The relatedness of the categories was manipulated, and instructio ns were presented about how to go about combining these categories. Su bsequently, people were asked to solve a series of novel ill-defined p roblems. It was found that performance on the category combination tas k was related to the quality and originality of problem solutions. Fur ther, when people were working with related categories, feature mappin g instructions contributed to performance, while metaphor instructions contributed to performance when people were working with diverse cate gories. The implications of these findings for understanding creative thought are discussed.