ABSTRACT

More than 50 years since the introduction of the concept of divergent production, little progress has been made in the development of parsimonious theoretical models that sufficiently explain creativity. Recently, the optimal foraging theory has been used to explain the search for items in memory tasks, suggesting the correspondence between the ability to search in a real environment and cognitive search as an essential part of cognitive models. However, the relationship between external search and divergent thinking tasks has not been empirically tested. Eight hundred and fifty-nine children were evaluated through tasks that require the visual or semantic search of information. A confirmatory factor analysis model showed that several models presented good adjustment indices. The best fit presented was a model of two latent independent factors and a general first-order factor that shows that external search and divergent thinking tasks share common mechanisms. This data empirically supports the theoretical development of the concept of divergent production under a novel empirical and evolutionary perspective that relates divergent thinking with the external and internal exploratory capacity.

摘要

自引入发散生产概念 50 多年以来，在充分解释创造力的简约理论模型的发展方面几乎没有取得任何进展。最近，最优觅食理论已被用于解释记忆任务中的物品搜索，表明在真实环境中搜索的能力与认知搜索之间的对应关系是认知模型的重要组成部分。然而，外部搜索与发散思维任务之间的关系尚未经过实证检验。通过需要对信息进行视觉或语义搜索的任务，对 859 名儿童进行了评估。验证性因子分析模型表明，几个模型呈现出良好的调整指标。提出的最佳拟合是两个潜在独立因素和一个一般一阶因素的模型，表明外部搜索和发散思维任务具有共同的机制。这些数据从经验上支持了在新的经验和进化视角下发散生产概念的理论发展，该视角将发散思维与外部和内部探索能力联系起来。