Abstract
It is necessary to retrieve less salient knowledge to think creatively (e.g., idea generation and insight problem solving). We hypothesized that people retrieve less salient knowledge by searching for a commonality between unrelated objects rather than by thinking about an object itself. In Experiment 1, fifty undergraduates were assigned to one of two groups:commonality search and word association. While the participants in the commonality search group were asked to list the commonalities between unrelated objects (e.g., a strawberry and a television), those in the word association group were asked to list as many words as they could remember from each object. The answers listed by the participants in the commonality search group were less salient than those in the word association group. In Experiment 2, we obtained the same pattern of results as those of Experiment 1 with modified procedure and measures of saliency. We concluded that the commonality search between unrelated objects is effective in retrieving less salient knowledge.
