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Structured Imagination in Story Creation
Author(s) -
PAVLIK LISA
Publication year - 1997
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.2162-6057.1997.tb00790.x
Subject(s) - originality , meaning (existential) , value (mathematics) , dimension (graph theory) , psychology , epistemology , social psychology , creativity , computer science , philosophy , mathematics , machine learning , pure mathematics
Studies on structural imagination show that imaginative thinking is guided by conceptual knowledge structures. The two present studies explored the role of structured imagination in story creation. In Study 1, it was predicted that variations in the representational knowledge of abstract concepts would influence whether or not stories are meaningful and original to readers. In addition, it was predicted that meaningful and original stories would be more likely to express abstract concepts than nonmeaningful and nonoriginal stories. In Study 2, it was predicted that stories evaluated as meaningful/original, meaningful/nonoriginal, or nonmeaningful/nonoriginal would be related to the qualities of meaning/nonmeaning and originality/nonoriginality of the image descriptions used to write them. Chi‐square analyses and percentage differences showed support for representational knowledge as an important influence on story meaning and originality, and that meaningful and original stories were more likely to contain abstract concepts than nonmeaningful and nonoriginal stories. In addition, significant correlations were found between the creating of meaningful versus nonmeaningful stories and the use of meaningful versus nonmeaningful knowledge pools. However, significance was not found for the originality/nonoriginality dimension.