Temporal Analysis Method to Visualize Changes in Alternative Uses Test Performance
Authors: Fukada Ryunosuke , Ueda Kimi , Ishii Hirotake , Shimoda Hiroshi 
Published: January 2024

In recent years, creative thinking has been gaining importance. Creative thinking can be broadly classified into two types of thinking: divergent thinking, which generates a wide variety of ideas from a single concept or idea, and convergent thinking, which converges a wide variety of ideas into a single concluding idea. One of the representative methods to evaluate the performance of divergent thinking is the Alternative Uses Test (AUT), a task in which participants are asked to respond to as many ideas for different uses of a presented object as possible. There are several measures of divergent thinking performance, including fluency, flexibility, and originality, and the AUT has been evaluated by scoring the number and variety of ideas and the degree of rarity of ideas as scores for each measure respectively. Although the AUT has been used in many studies because it is easy to implement, most of these studies only evaluated performance throughout the entire AUT, making it difficult to analyze performance from a temporal perspective, such as adding stimuli to the person working on the AUT or changing the environment or conditions under which the AUT is performed, to evaluate the effects of changes in the environment, or to evaluate the impact of changes in environment and conditions on performance. With regard to flexibility in particular, it was difficult to quantify in detail the quality of ideas from the perspective of flexibility at a given point in time or to evaluate the breadth of thinking, because all participants' responses were categorized using the conventional method. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to propose a method to analyze fluency and flexibility from a temporal perspective. For the analysis of the temporal perspective, we focused on performance in intervals of AUT task time subdivided into 30-second intervals. Fluency was calculated from the number of responses in the unit interval. Flexibility was calculated by applying the flexibility method proposed by the authors (Fukada, et al. 2023), which employs natural language processing, to quantify the dissimilarity between ideas answered at a certain point in time and those answered before that point in time, in order to evaluate the quality of ideas in terms of flexibility at that point in time. An experiment was conducted with 32 undergraduate and graduate students, and the data of 3507 responses they obtained working on 16 trials of AUT, each of which lasted 4 minutes, were included in the analysis. When these data were analyzed using the proposed method, performance tended to monotonically decrease after the second interval, but fluency and flexibility increased from 30 to 60 seconds before the end of the AUT trial. This follows the suggestion that moderate time pressure has a positive impact on divergent thinking performance.Fukada, R., Ueda, K., Ishii, H., Shimoda, H., Obayashi, F., A Study on a Method for Automated Evaluation of Flexibility of Alternative Uses Test, Proceedings of the 85th National Convention of IPSJ, No.4, pp.129-130.