Assessment of Divergent Thinking in a Social and Modular Robotics Task: An Edit Distance Approach at the Configuration Level

Abstract

Creativity is a complex human process evaluated through psychometric tasks, mostly in relation to divergent thinking (DT) or the capacity to generate new ideas. In social robotics, creativity has been supported in different interactions with social robots, in which the Human Robot Interaction (HRI) supports the participants’ creativity. However, as scores are typically used for such evaluations, they struggle to capture the inherent creative process involved in a task. In this paper, we focus on creative problem solving in Human Robot Interaction considering the edit distance by analyzing the evolution of the different configurations of a set of modular robotic cubes during the task resolution. For this objective, we consider the three DT components of fluidity, flexibility, and innovation as evaluated in the Alternate Use Test task. We then operationalize the edit distance (ED), usually used for quantifying the minimum number of operations required to transform one configuration into another. ED is a way to compute the differences between two intermediate creative solutions. We engaged 224 participants in playing the CreaCube task, and then we analyzed the videos for identifying in time each of the configurations. The results allow us to maintain the hypothesis related to the DT components in relation to ED and discuss the implications of this study in social robotics.