Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research on creative thinking has implicatedconceptual expansion as potential cognitive underpinnings.These theories were examined within the context of alaboratory study using two divergent thinking prompts.Participants generated alternative/creative uses for a brick andfor a glass bottle (separately) for two minutes and responseswere time-stamped using a Matlab GUI. Semantic distancesbetween responses and conceptual representations of the DTprompts were computed using latent semantic analysis.Results showed that semantic distance increased asresponding progressed, with significant differences betweenthe two tasks, and intraparticipant variation. Results haveimplications for theories of creative thinking and representmethodological and analytic advances in the study ofdivergent thinking.