Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The current study examines the role of constraints in well-defined 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 shows 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.