Perception and Cognition Lab

Creative Thinking

Is creative thinking used only in art, music, poetry or drama? Or Is it also required to deal with enormous problems varying from day-to-day experiences to more complex problems, selling products; success in business; product designs; designing interactive and learning sessions for students, any workshop, or any event; planning and choosing one’s career; reducing crime rates or youth aggression; building trust and confidence in society; and so on and so forth.

Our team of scientists and students are interested in understanding the interaction between creative thinking and problem-solving. Furthermore, we are interested in developing methods/ tools for inculcating creative thinking through adaptive problem-solving tasks. More specifically, we are focusing on reasoning ability used in solving ill-versus well-structured problems and its interaction with emotion; cognitive flexibility; motivation; perseverance; and individual differences. To answer related research issues we use modeling, eye-tracking, EEG, physiological monitoring devices from BioNomadix.

More specifically, the project has following goals:

  1. Relationship between attention, creative thinking and problem-solving
  2. Role of emotion and mental set in creative cognition
  3. Development of Adaptive Problem Solving System (AAPSS) and its influence on creative thinking
  4. Relationship between abstract thinking and creative abilities

Related work:

Creativity and Abstraction

An experiment to find the relationship between creativity and abstraction. Abstraction is the process of taking the qualities of objects or ideas and denoting them in a higher concept in the mind.

We're trying to establish this with two tasks. The first being the Abstraction Test containing a 5*5 grid of every objects that the participants have to group based on properties. The second is a Creativity Test where requiring the participants to make as many relations between 5 pairs of objects.

This experiment is an attempt to better understand the process of creative thinking.

Creativity and Mental Representation

Raven’s advanced progressive matrices challenge the unidimensional general fluid intelligence (gF) assessment. The studies showed two types of reasoning: visuo- spatial/ perceptual and verbal-analytical/ propositional reasoning, indicating distinct cognitive processing. This acknowledgment becomes vital during intelligence and creative thinking prediction, as traditional problem solving test does not predict creative reasoning ability very well. We have conducted a study by asking participants to solve and create similar kind of problem involving either visuo- spatial/ perceptual or verbal-analytical/ propositional reasoning.