The Role of Specificity and Abstraction in Creative Idea Generation

By Thomas B. Ward, Merryl J. Patterson, Cynthia M. Sifonis. 2004

255 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Mechanical Engineering, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a78d28715fccb52de91f385c1d2b2f6c5019fc21

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Mechanical Engineering

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Creativity and Planning: Training Interventions to Develop Creative Problem-Solving Skills (2006, background): “Provided one has the requisite ability to work with relevant principles, principles allow people to extrapolate beyond “the givens,” thereby contributing to creative thought (Ward et al., 2004).”
The Impact of Type of Examples on Originality: Explaining Fixation and Stimulation Effects. (2014, unknown): “Although this result confirms that a stimulation effect of example is possible [10], [3], see also [13], [14]”
Applying Multiple Knowledge Structures in Creative Thought: Effects on Idea Generation and Problem-Solving (2008, background): “Some support for this conclusion may be found in a more recent study by Ward, Patterson, and Sifonis (2004).”
The highest form of intelligence: Sarcasm increases creativity for both expressers and recipients (2015, background): “, 1993), specifically abstract thinking (e.g., Finke, 1995; Ward et al., 2004).”
Applied Tests of Design Skills—Part 1: Divergent Thinking (2012, background): “In such cases, the original cognitive knowledge structures applied to a problem are inappropriate and insight can be achieved only through what cognitive psychologists have called cognitive restructuring [16–19].”
Four Mental Operations in Creative Cognition: The Importance of Abstraction (2007, background): “Explicit reference to the role of abstraction in creativity can be found in Ward, Patterson, and Sifonis (2004), who demonstrated that encouraging abstract ways of formulating creative generation tasks results in increased originality.”
How Dual-Identity Processes Foster Creativity (2014, background): “…of a situation, such as the environmental properties of a planet, this led to the generation of more creative exemplars of alien creatures (compared to a neutral baseline, and an experimental condition in which participants were asked to think of animals that already exist; Ward et al., 2004).”