The Effects of Environmental Scene and Body Posture on Embodied Strategies in Creative Thinking

ABSTRACT

Accounts of embodied cognition suggest that environmental scene and motor information can be used in a type of neural simulation when generating creative uses for manipulable objects. A scarce amount of studies suggests that the state of the body and environment play a role in people’s ability to devise creative uses for objects. In this theoretically motivated study, we manipulated the environmental context and adopted a previously used body posture manipulation, while participants performed the alternative uses task (AUT) under general instructions or instructions to describe actions toward or away from the body. We show that the environment and body posture interact to shape performance on the AUT. Specifically, body posture facilitates fluent responding under high fixedness environmental contexts. In addition, describing actions away from the body results in more original AUT responses. Further, we replicate previous findings that higher-creative individuals use different “embodied strategies” than less-creative individuals when generating creative uses for objects. We propose that higher-creative individuals differentially access and navigate an abstract “action space” necessary for simulating creative uses of objects.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability

All data collected in this study and scripts to analyze it can be found at https://osf.io/9qzc3/

Notes

1. Note that 6 participants declined to report their age, gender and handedness, though they were sampled from the same participant pool as the rest of our participants.

2. For reasons not reported here, prior to beginning the experiment and at the end, participants completed a questionnaire assessing their affective state and how enjoyable they thought the task would be. This was in order to potentially explore the effects of affect on creativity; it has previously been shown that positive affective states can result in higher creativity (e.g. Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987) and we sought to determine whether performing our tasks had any effect on mood. However, a small range of mood scores suggested we inadequately constructed the mood questionnaire and this dissuaded us from pursuing this idea further. Further, for reasons not reported here, participants completed a visual imagery questionnaire at the end of the experiment, but are not analyzed because we deemed them theoretically and statistically inadequate.

3. The R command for our model is written as: fluency ~ posture * scene context * instruction + (1|Participant) + (1|Stimulus).

4. The R command for our model is: SemDis ~ posture * scene context * instruction + (1|Participant) + (1|Stimulus)

5. The R command for these models can be written as: Embodied dimension ~ MeanSemDis + (1|Participant) + (1|Stimulus). In all cases the family was specified as “binomial”. We used the “bobyqa” optimizer with 100,000 iterations to ensure good fit.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Network for Research and Innovation in Machining Technology, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [Undergraduate Summer Research Award]; Canadian Network for Research and Innovation in Machining Technology, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [Discovery Grant].