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Creative Thinking From An Information Processing Perspective: A New Approach To Mednick's Theory Of Associative Hierarchies
Author(s) -
CONEY JEFFREY,
SERNA PETA
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
the journal of creative behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.896
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 2162-6057
pISSN - 0022-0175
DOI - 10.1002/j.2162-6057.1995.tb00740.x
Subject(s) - associative property , hierarchy , creative thinking , psychology , content addressable memory , perspective (graphical) , cognitive psychology , stimulus (psychology) , creativity , cognitive science , computer science , mathematics , social psychology , artificial intelligence , pure mathematics , artificial neural network , economics , market economy
Mednick (1962) proposed a theory of the creative thinking process which asserts that in generating associative responses to a stimulus, creative individuals are characterized by a flatter associative hierarchy than are less creative individuals. In order to assess this idea, an associative priming paradigm was used to measure latencies to lexical decisions primed by associations of low, medium, or high strength. Mednick's theory was not supported. However, it was found that the responses of creative subjects were uniformly less facilitated at all levels of associative strength. The set of associative strengths employed in the experiment may not have ranged low enough to provide a realistic test of creative processes. If so, then the obtained findings may be consistent with Mednick's theory as it applies to the upper end of the associative continuum.