Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Creative ideas emerge from a meshwork of dynamic elements.Resources internal and external to the agent configure a cognitiveecosystem that scaffolds performance. In addition, capitalizing onfortuitous external cues may trigger new ideas. We examined theseelements to determine how they come into play during a simpleword production task. Participants were video recorded as theygenerated new words from 7 letter tiles in three differentenvironments (i) high interactivity where the titles could be movedat will (ii) low interactivity where they could not, and (iii) lowinteractivity where the order of the tiles could be shuffled but onceshuffled no additional actions were allowed. Overall, interactivityhad a marginally positive impact on performance, whileindependent measures of participants’ verbal fluency were strongpredictors of performance in all environments. Based on a detailedcoding of the video data, a finer-grained analysis of behaviour in thehigh interactivity condition revealed that the time participants spentmanipulating the tiles was a significant predictor of performance.The video data also allowed us to measure the average latency to theproduction of a new word after shuffling the letters in the lowinteractivity condition as an index of how ‘lucky’ the reset was:Shorter average latencies were a significant predictor of overallword production. These data indicate that interactivity, serendipity,and internal cognitive resources determine problem-solvingperformance in this task.