Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The purpose of this study was to clarify the cognitive processes of commonality search between unrelated objects. Specifically, we investigated the relationship between the performance of the commonality search task and that of the alternative categorization task. We hypothesized that one needs to focus on obscure features of objects to do both tasks well and that there would therefore be a positive correlation between the performances on the two tasks. We also compared the performance of the commonality search task with that of the alternative categorization to investigate exploratorily how each task promotes creative thinking. Thirty-one participants were asked to engage in two tasks: the commonality search task and the alternative categorization task. In the commonality search task, they were asked to list as many commonalities as possible between nine unrelated object pairs within 90 seconds for each pair. In the alternative categorization task, they were asked to list as many categories as possible to which each of the five objects belonged, within 60 seconds for each object. Although There was a significant positive correlation between the numbers of answers on these tasks. The additional results showed that there was no significant difference between the two tasks in terms of average saliency score or the first answer, but the saliency of the commonality search task was significant lower than the alternative categorization task in the second answer. We discussed the similarities and differences between the two tasks and the potential use of the commonality search task as a way to promote creative thinking.