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 related to creative thinking. Further, it is unclear how people go about combining and reorganizing diverse categories. In this study, 112 undergraduates were asked to work on a set of category combination problems. The relatedness of the categories was manipulated, and instructions were presented about how to go about combining these categories. Subsequently, people were asked to solve a series of novel ill-defined problems. It was found that performance on the category combination task was related to the quality and originality of problem solutions. Further, when people were working with related categories, feature mapping instructions contributed to performance, while metaphor instructions contributed to performance when people were working with diverse categories. The implications of these findings for understanding creative thought are discussed.