Priming on the path of least resistance
Date
2001
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Texas A&M University
Abstract
The generation of new ideas was investigated by first noting how ideas are created for object concepts, such as 'tools' and 'animals', and then testing whether or not the same mechanism applies to idea generation for the non-object concept, of 'rituals'. The manner in which new ideas are generated is thought to follow the path of least resistance, where category exemplars that come to mind first are the ones used as starting points for novel creations from a given domain. Properties of a concept are determined through 'representativeness' measures (Output Dominance, Typicality, and Familiarity) that indicate the participants' cognitive structure of the concept. Characteristics of the concept properties were collected by participants listing and rating rituals exemplars. Idea generation tasks were performed, and were then examined for the occurrence of exemplars. By correlating the three concept measures with the occurrence of exemplars in the idea generation task, it was found that the Output Dominance measure is the best predictor of new idea starting points. This was previously shown to be the case with object categories, and in this study using the non-object category of rituals, there is evidence that the Output Dominance measure of concept representativeness is also a reliable predictor of novel idea starting points. New ideas may also be generated through priming. In these experiments, an imaginary sense re-creation/diverse-knowledge-domains prime was applied to see if originality scores could be improved. The evidence collected here indicates that visualization and non-specific priming of knowledge domains do not affect originality scores on imagination tasks.
Description
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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-47).
Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-47).
Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.
Keywords
psychology., Major psychology.