Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated how people find commonalities between unrelated objects as a basis of generating creative ideas by ex-amining the relationship between performances on commonality search and alternative categorization tasks. We predicteda positive correlation between performances on the two tasks because one needs to focus on some obscure features ofobjects to do both tasks well. Thirty-one undergraduates were asked to engage in both commonality search and alternativecategorization tasks. They were asked to list as many as commonalities between nine unrelated object pairs for 90 secondsfor each pair. They were then asked to list as many categories as possible that each of five objects belong to for 60 secondsper object. The results showed a significant positive correlation between the performances on these tasks. We concludedthat commonality search and alternative categorization both focus on obscure features of objects.