Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Memory retrieval is the basis of idea generation. We hypothesized that people retrieve more original knowledge by search-ing for a commonality between unrelated objects than by thinking about an object itself. Seventy-seven undergraduatesfrom Nagoya University were assigned to one of three conditions: a commonality search and either of two control condi-tions. In the first session, the participants in the commonality search condition listed a feature shared by a pair of wordspresented; those in the control conditions listed a feature associated with a word presented. In the second session, all par-ticipants were asked to list the words associated with the features they identified in the previous session. Results showedthat the features and the words listed in the commonality search condition were more original than those in either controlcondition. We concluded that the method we proposed is effective in retrieving original knowledge for idea generation.