Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Semantic search and retrieval of information plays an im-portant role in creative idea generation. This study was de-signed to examine how semantic and temporal clustering varieswhen asking participants to generate ideas about uses for ob-jects compared with generating members of goal-derived cat-egories. Participants generated uses for three objects: brick,hammer, picture frame, and also generated members of thefollowing goal-derived categories: things to take in case of afire, things to sell at a garage sale, and ways to spend lotterywinnings. Using response-time analysis and semantic analysis,results illustrated that all six prompts generally led to exponen-tial cumulative response-time distributions. However, the pro-portion of temporally clustered responses, defined using theslope-difference algorithm, was higher for goal-derived cate-gory responses compared with object uses. Despite that, over-all pairwise semantic similarity was higher for object uses thanfor goal derived exemplars. The effect of prompt on pairwisesemantic similarity is likely the result of context-dependencyof exemplars from goal-derived categories. However, the cur-rent analysis contains a potential confound such that specialinstructions to give “common and uncommon” responses wereprovided only for the object-uses prompts. The confound islikely minimal, but future work is necessary to verify that theseresults would hold when the confound is removed.