The Influence of Creative Expertise on the Sensitivity and Selectivity of Analogical Reasoning

Abstract

This study compared the analogical reasoning of three groups that differed in their creative expertise: professional actors, undergraduate acting majors, and nonactors. Using an Analogy Finding Task, in which participants identified valid and nonvalid verbal analogies, three aspects of participants' analogical reasoning were measured: the number of analogies participants selected as valid (Quantity), the rate of true‐positive analogical identification (Sensitivity), and the rate of true‐negative identification of nonvalid analogies (Selectivity). The Analogy Finding Task was administered under both a baseline and a “think creatively” prompt. Results showed that actors (professional or student) were significantly more Sensitive to valid analogies than nonactors, and these creative experts were significantly more influenced by the “think creatively” prompt, which increased the Quantity, and decreased the Selectivity, of actors' analogical reasoning. To explain these results, we forward the general hypothesis that creative experts may be more flexible in response to creativity‐relevant contextual cues than nonexperts.

Relational Reasoning: A Foundation for Higher Cognition Based on Abstraction

“…Informed consent was obtained for the reviewed studies. Note: two articles for this special issue appeared in an earlier issue of MBE (15:3): Gray & Holyoak (2021) and Dumas, Dong, & Doherty (2021).…”

To map or not to map: Professional actors are capable of validly connecting extremely distant verbal analogues.

“…In a recently published empirical study (Dumas, Dong, & Doherty, 2021), Dumas and colleagues utilized the AFT to study the analogical sensitivity and selectivity of multiple samples of participants who differed on the degree of expertise they had developed in a creative discipline: professional actors who were members of North American acting labor unions, undergraduate student actors, and adults with no acting experience. Multiple conditions for the administration of the AFT were also utilized in this study, including explicit prompts for participants to think creatively while they engaged with the AFT.…”

“…Therefore, keeping in mind the way that increasing semantic distance among analogues requires participants to think in more and more abstract ways and increases the difficulty of analogical mappings, it might be reasonable to hypothesize that individuals with a high degree of training in creative thinking could be capable of abstracting relations among analogues to an extent that most psychologists (who are the ones who create the analogical reasoning tasks) are not. What this might suggest is that the professional actors in the Dumas, Dong, and Doherty (2021) study may not have been simply “casting a wider net” and mapping nonvalid analogies, but they may have actually been finding meaningful ways to apply very abstract relations among the word pairs and they may have been validly mapping the analogies. The possibility that professional actors may be capable of validly mapping extremely distant analogues seems to be inherently interesting to psychologists, and relevant to the field’s understanding of creative and relational cognition.…”

“…The possibility that professional actors may be capable of validly mapping extremely distant analogues seems to be inherently interesting to psychologists, and relevant to the field’s understanding of creative and relational cognition. Unfortunately, the relatively constrained methodology utilized by Dumas, Dong, and Doherty (2021) did not allow this line of inquiry to be pursued.…”

Understanding ideational fluency as a survival process

“…As a way to address these issues, some recent work (Dumas, Dong, & Doherty, 2021) has suggested that actors could reasonably be identified as experts in creative thinking, and that actors could be recruited in educational psychology research as a way to understand how creative expertise operates, and how it develops. This is because actors’ training frequently includes disciplined practice on theatre exercises that are very similar to psychological tasks commonly used to stimulate creative thought (e.g., the Alternate Uses Task or Just Suppose Task; Sawyer, 2014).…”