Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Collaboration takes place everywhere in everyday life, and exposure to the ideas of others is a core process in collaboration. In this study, we investigated whether exposure to other people's ideas facilitates idea generation: 123 participants were asked to list as many ideas as possible to increase turnout in one of three conditions: constant exposure, intermittent exposure, or no exposure. Participants in the no exposure condition generated ideas without exposure to other's ideas. In the constant exposure condition, one of the sets of ideas generated by participants in the no exposure condition was presented on every trial. In the intermittent exposure condition, ideas were only presented in trials 1, 4, and 7. As a result, there was no significant difference in the number of ideas generated between conditions. The conditions under which exposure to the ideas of others facilitates idea generation were discussed.