Divergent thinking: Strategies and executive involvement in generating novel uses for familiar objects (2007)

The ability to generate many different possible solutions to a problem is an important aspect of creative thinking and has been specifically addressed in the psychometric tradition by means of divergent thinking tests (Guilford, 1971; Guilford, Christensen, Merrifield, & Wilson, 1978) in which participants are asked to generate as many alternative solutions as they can (Plucker & Renzulli, 1999). These tests contrast with convergent thinking tests in which there is but a single solution, e.g. Raven’s Matrices (1960) and other standard intelligence tests. The Alternative Uses task is a prototypical divergent task in which the goal is to generate many possible uses, different from the common use, for familiar objects. In this task, the responses produced may be completely novel for the individual; for example, with the target item ‘barrel’, a use as ‘a source of termite food’ might be produced by a participant who had never before seen, heard or thought of such a use. In Boden’s (2004, p. 2) terminology, divergent production tasks can therefore involve ‘ personal-psychological creativity ’, i.e. producing an idea that is new to the person who produces it, irrespective of how many people have had that idea before. In validation studies, divergent tests have been found to be better correlated with real-life measures of creative behaviour, such as gaining patents, producing novels and plays, founding businesses or professional organizations (Plucker, 1999; Torrance, 1981, 1988) than were convergent tests of intelligence. The Alternative Uses task then represents a convenient paradigm for the study of creative processes and so this task has often been used in psychometric and experimental studies of creativity.