Process-Based Measures of Creative Problem-Solving Skills: III. Category Selection

Because people must organize information and combine or reorganize categories to produce creative solutions, there is reason to suspect that concepts play an important role in creative thought. Unfortunately, little is known about the kind of concepts that contribute to the success of people' s creative problem-solving efforts. Accordingly, 135 college students were presented with a series of novel, ill-defined problems in which they were asked to select a set of concepts they thought would help them solve these problems. These indices of concept preferences were then correlated with the quality and originality of the solutions obtained on a set of two creative problem-solving tasks. The use of concepts organized around long-term goals was positively related to indices of solution quality and originality. The implications of these findings for understanding the kind of concepts that contribute to creative thought are discussed.