Object Combinations for Alternative Uses Test Suitable for 2-Condition Within-Participant Comparisons

Abstract

In recent years, creative thinking has been gaining importance. Creative thinking can be broadly classified into two types of thinking: divergent thinking, which generates a wide variety of ideas from a single concept or idea, and convergent thinking, which converges a wide variety of ideas into a single concluding idea [1]. Since improving the performance of divergent thinking leads to the good performance of creative thinking, many methods have been proposed to support divergent thinking. One of the representative methods to evaluate divergent thinking performance is the Alternative Uses Test (AUT) [2], a task in which participants are asked to respond to as many ideas for different uses of a presented object as possible. Measures of divergent thinking performance include fluency, flexibility, and originality, and when evaluating the AUT [3]. The AUT has been used in many studies because of the short time required to respond to tasks and the relative ease of evaluation. However, the performance of the AUT can vary greatly depending on the individual's experience with the presented object in AUT, and when conducting an AUT under multiple conditions, such as in a comparison experiment, differences in presented objects may have a greater impact on responses than differences between conditions. For these reasons, the AUT is not suitable for within-participant comparisons unless appropriate objects are chosen. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to select appropriate objects, to which the same participant shows similar responses, for within-participant comparisons. First, we listed 32 objects as candidates for appropriate objects for the AUT, which were then narrowed down to 16 through experiments with 4 participants. An experiment was conducted using these 16 objects. 32 undergraduate and graduate students participated in the experiment. They responded to the AUT on these 16 objects. In total, there were 3507 responses. Responses were independently validated by three evaluators and classified into 26 categories. Then, we calculated the quantity of responses to the AUT, and the AUT fluency score from the evaluated data, and conducted a 2-way ANOVA, which revealed that the performance of the AUT differed depending on the object. We examined combinations of objects with the lowest variance using standardized scores and suggested several combinations of objects suitable for within-participant comparisons.[1] J.P. Guilford, “The nature of human intelligence,” New York, McGraw-Hill,1967.[2] Guilford, J.P. “The Structure of Intellect”. Psychological Bulletin, 53(4), pp. 267-293. 1956.[3] Torrance, E. P.: The nature of creativity as manifest in its testing, The nature of creativity, pp. 43–75. 1988.