Creativity and innovation have brought about phenomenal changes throughout human history. Art, science, medicine, industry, and technology have all grown through creative and innovative behavior. A complete science of human behavior needs to account for “creativity,” especially given its importance in society. Prior behavioral research has been able to account for creative behavior in animals by training the component skills of a complex creative solution and arranging environmental conditions which result in the recombination of component skills to produce a creative solution. The present study partially replicates creativity research conducted in a laboratory setting with animals by conducting a similarly arranged laboratory study with humans. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether a creative solution to a difficult problem could be produced by teaching participants the necessary component skills and arranging the environment in such a way as to cause the component skills to recombine in order to solve the problem. The present study suggests that such an approach may be viable and provides an experimental task that can be used in future human creativity research.

创造力和创新在整个人类历史上带来了惊人的变化。艺术、科学、医学、工业和技术都通过创造性和创新行为得到发展。一门关于人类行为的完整科学需要考虑“创造力”，特别是考虑到它在社会中的重要性。先前的行为研究已经能够通过训练复杂创造性解决方案的组成技能和安排环境条件来解释动物的创造性行为，这些环境条件导致组成技能的重组以产生创造性的解决方案。本研究通过对人类进行类似安排的实验室研究，部分复制了在实验室环境中对动物进行的创造力研究。本研究的目的是确定是否可以通过向参与者传授必要的组成技能并以一种使组成技能重新组合以解决问题的方式布置环境来产生对难题的创造性解决方案。目前的研究表明，这种方法可能是可行的，并提供了一项可用于未来人类创造力研究的实验任务。