How constraints in problem solving affect creative reasoning?

Abstract

Creativity is an interesting and exciting topic of research due its mysterious and complex nature. There is an ocean of literature present on the topic and our work is a drop in the ocean. To understand creativity, it is essential to understand the underlying cognitive strategies. Our thesis aims to understand how inducing different types of constraints impacts creative reasoning. To address this question, we conducted a study that examines the role of constraints in welldefined problem-solving in ill-defined problem-solving. We chose variants of Raven’s advanced progressive matrices(APM) for well-defined problem-solving and creative reasoning tasks (CRT) for ill-defined problem-solving. Using traditional APM, we created a novel version of APM with comparatively lesser constraints available to solve the puzzle, called creative APM(cAPM). The cAPM task was designed to induce divergent thinking along with convergent thinking. It is assumed that the difference in constraints changes the nature of the problem space in solving APM and cAPM and may differently affect the following creative reasoning task. We randomly assigned 50 participants to perform APM or cAPM, followed by the CRT, in a fixed order. We observed a significant effect of constraints available to solve well-defined problems on ill-defined problem-solving. The current result showed higher CRT scores when CRT preceded cAPM (Median = 79.25) than APM (Median = 53.00). The result suggests that the flexibility in constraints to solve a well-defined problem induces more divergent thinking alongside convergent thinking and facilitates creative thinking required in ill-defined problem-solving. Following this study, we conducted another study to understand whether the constraints in the well-defined problem solving task impacts the ill-defined problem solving task of a different knowledge domain. The well-defined problem solving tasks remain same as the previous study. For the ill-defined problem solving task we have chosen creative reasoning tasks (CRT) which is of same knowledge domain and alternate uses task[46] of a different knowledge domain. We have collected a sample of 44 participants. We observed a significant effect of the variant of APM on CRT performance. Higher number of rules in the CRT was observed when it was preceded by cAPM (Median = 2) compared to the classic APM (Median = 1). Further, we observed a higher CRT Relationship Score under cAPM (Median = 78.5) compared to the classic APM (Median = 50.5) puzzle conditions. However, the variant of APM did not show a significant effect on AUT, fluency score(p = 0.8 for independent t-test) and elaboration score (p = 0.48 for Mann-Whitney U test). The current results fail to show domain general than specific nature of creative thinking, especially when it is induced varying the constraints of abstract reasoning.