The Cognitive Underpinnings of Option Generation in Everyday Life Decision‐Making: A Latent Variable Analysis

Abstract

The ability to generate options for action is crucial for everyday life decision‐making. In this article, we propose and test a model of the cognitive underpinnings of option generation in everyday life situations. We carried out a laboratory study using measures of a wide range of cognitive functions and asked participants (N = 157) to generate options for actions for different everyday life decision‐making scenarios. The results of a latent variable analysis show that the cognitive underpinnings of option generation are consistent across different everyday life situations and, hence, option generation can be conceptualized as a general construct. Moreover, the results of a confirmatory factor analysis reveal that, when controlling for the shared variance among the cognitive processes assessed, verbal fluency, working memory capacity, ideation fluency, and processing speed predicted option generation. These findings suggest that option generation in everyday life situations can be distinguished from other cognitive constructs, such as divergent thinking (in terms of ideas’ originality) and long‐term memory.

The relationship of divergent thinking with broad retrieval ability and processing speed: A meta-analysis

“…Research on the relationship between DT originality (or creativity) and Gs provided evidence for all possible alternatives, including positive correlations (Rindermann & Neubauer, 2004), negative correlations (Dorfman et al, 2008), and near-zero correlations (Leder et al, 2018). To elaborate, Forthmann, Lips et al (2020) found no support for contamination of DT originality by Gs under speeded conditions (runspeeded = .25, rspeeded = .21).…”

Working Memory and Divergent Thinking: The Moderating Role of Field-Dependent-Independent Cognitive Style in Adolescence

“…In soccer athletes, the domain-general WMC, as measured by solving math problems while trying to remember an unrelated set of letters, was found to be unrelated to a soccer-specific DT test, which consisted of finding many different alternative solutions to offensive football scenes [27]. Even though these results question the association between WMC and DT, other studies revealed that WMC is directly related to different components of DT, such as fluency [28,29], flexibility [30], elaboration [31], originality, infrequency, and persistence [28], or indirectly related to DT by intelligence [32], associative fluency [33], and task instructions [34]. Specifically, increasing WMC can support the extraction of information while performing DT activities [35].…”