Theorists operating in the associationist tradition have consistently maintained that creative thinking involves the ability to generate remote associations. It has been inferred that this ability requires a particular kind of associative memory structure, one which is characterized by many between-configuration links and many weak within-configuration links. However, there has been a paucity of studies examining the associative memory structures of creative individuals. Still, considerable effort has been devoted in the developmental literature to delineating various types of organizational structures in children's memories. Consequently, this research explored how associational processes operate in children vis-a-vis their memory structures. As well, an attempt was made to replicate part of a frequently-cited developmental shift from children's use of themes and categories to their use of categories as organizational structures on memory tasks. A series of three studies, each employing different memory tasks, were conducted to examine differences in the associative memory structures of more creative and less creative children in grades 3 and 7. Stimulus words used for the experimental tasks comprised three configural dimensions: within category, within theme, and between category and theme. The expected developmental shift towards increased category usage with age was partially replicated on a sorting task; Grade 3 children used more associations than Grade 7 children, and Grade 7 children used more categories than Grade 3 children. Results obtained on two receptive memory tasks (i.e., associability-rating and association-decision) indicated that the associative memory structures of more creative versus less creative children, as well as older versus younger children, appear to be characterized by many strong within-category associative links, fewer and weaker within-theme associative links, and very few and weak between-category-and-theme associative links. Yet, results obtained on one productive memory task (i.e., recall) revealed that both older more creative children and younger children tend to retain the use of weak between-category-and-theme associative links, whereas older less creative children relinquish these over time. These results suggest that the creative individual's continued ability to access weak between-configuration links from memory accounts in part for his/her ability to generate remote associations. As well, it appears that this ability to generate remote associations occurs not during the encoding stage but during retrieval. This coincides with recent developments in the computational modelling of creative thinking processes. Such developments highlight the creative individual's selection of viable associations among ideas, rather than the generation of associations among ideas per se.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/9952 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Boyko, Kelly A. |
| Contributors | Mercier, Pierre, |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 250 p. |
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