Divergent thinking in the grasslands: thinking about object function in the context of a grassland survival scenario elicits more alternate uses than control scenarios

ABSTRACT

The survival processing effect is a recall advantage for information processed in the context of a grassland survival scenario. The current studies build upon previous research suggesting the effect is due to elaborative encoding and functional thinking. In two experiments, participants completed the “alternate uses test” under five conditions: baseline, grassland survival, Ebola survival, moving to a new home and planning a bank heist. Experiment 1 stimuli were everyday objects. Experiment 2 stimuli were functionally ambiguous “mystery” objects. Number of generated uses was highest in the baseline, but the grassland scenario was consistently highest of the schematic conditions. Recall data lend support to the mnemonic superiority of the grassland condition. Results suggest that grassland scenarios place fewer attenuating constraints on divergent thinking. It is suggested that the survival processing effect might be usefully conceptualised as an effect of creatively thinking about object function in response to broadly defined problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptive memory
• survival processing
• divergent thinking
• problem solving
• functional thinking

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Hope Christie, Stella Wilde, Karl Johnson, Aysel Denli and Tuntiak Karakras Murray and Matthew Gibson for help with data collection and coding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹Kang et al. (2008) collected norming data comparing the grasslands and bank heist scenarios, and reported no difference between the two on how exciting they are perceived to be and on how novel they are perceived to be. Given that Bell et al. (2015) suggest that novelty of scenario may influence the functional thinking that is primed by it, it was decided that the bank heist scenario would make an appropriate control condition. If the data suggest that the bank heist and grasslands conditions are quantitatively different in terms of the divergent thinking that they elicit, then it is unlikely that this could be explained by differences in novelty between the scenarios.

²It was felt that it was important to distinguish total responses from valid responses in the scenario conditions because otherwise it would not be possible to determine responses that had been generated in response to the scenario itself and responses that had been generated for the object with no regard to the scenario constraints

³These comparisons excluded the Standard AUT condition, as comparing what might be “valid” responses in this condition with “valid” responses in the other conditions would not make sense given that the Standard AUT specifies no scenario to which responses must be valid in relation to.

⁴Note that memory for responses deemed invalid are included in this recall score. This was decided on the basis that, even although certain responses might be deemed invalid by the raters, all responses were generated as part of the same generation task and so should enjoy the same mnemonic benefit, should one exist.

⁵As participants were instructed to write down uses in any order they wished, readers may be concerned about how we dealt with similar or identical responses that may have been generated in different conditions. Although this is a valid methodological concern and is addressed in experiment 2, neither rater experienced any instances in which a response could not be easily classified as belonging to a single condition.

⁶It's worth noting that proportion recall was not significantly correlated with total uses generated in any of the conditions, suggesting that any recall advantage is due to the schema itself being used as a way to structure recall rather than having anything to do with how many ideas were generated during the AUT.

⁷This large standard deviation was caused by the inclusion of one participant aged 75. Without this participant, the mean age is 21 with a standard deviation of 6.44. There is no suggestion that this one participant performed any differently to the rest of the sample and so is not excluded from the analysis.

⁸Although the stimuli in experiment 2 were essentially ambiguous, any participant who claimed to know the function of any of the objects was removed from the analysis so as not to confound any effect.

⁹As in Experiment 1, this comparison excluded the Standard AUT condition and only compared the schematic conditions

¹⁰Additionally, a further problem for any explanation that posits novelty as an important factor is that it must explain why the bank-heist scenario consistently fails to elicit a recall advantage despite it being rated as being equal in novelty to the grasslands scenario (Kang et al., 2008).