Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This research tested and confirmed a novel hypothesis that similarity sets the ground for diversities to emerge, which then give rise to creativity. Adopting an experimental design, we recruited 66 typically-developing Chinese children (M = 6.04 years, SD = .28). First, in a Comparison task, these children were randomly assigned to name differences between two objects that were either highly similar (high-similarity condition) or dissimilar (low-similarity condition). Next, all children completed a divergent thinking task and received scores on fluency, originality, and usefulness. Results of t-tests showed that children of high-similarity condition reported both more surface (pertaining to perceptual features) and deep (pertaining to structural features) alignable differences and have on average a higher originality score, compared to children of low-similarity condition. Mediation analysis results further showed that the number of deep alignable differences mediated the effect of condition on children's originality scores. This confirmed our expectation that the high similarity between objects facilitated children to generate more deep alignable differences, which subsequently facilitated children to generate more original ideas.