Associative Theories: Sarnoff Mednick

To seriously study creativity, it is useful to know something about the first scientific efforts to define and explain it, attributable to psychology.

  1. Step 1: Small doses...visuals!

    The idiosyncrasies, concepts and language of mechanical engineering are somewhat distant from the psychological approach and it is easy for the reader to lose the thread of the explanations by becoming entangled with its specific terminology and its forms of expression.

    For this reason, I have preferred to extract small fragments of the theories of creativity and make an effort to create my own graphic image for them.

    My graphics involve the risk of biasing and/or distorting the original ideas, which also exists when trying to paraphrase them, but it brings the will to understand them and translate them into engineering language in the hope of bringing both approaches closer together.

    To this end, I have relied on research works that compile and summarize these theories. In particular, the work of authors Busse & Mansfield that appears in the quotes in the next step of the tutorial.

  2. Step 2: Associative Theories: Sarnoff Mednick

    Busse & Mansfield (pp. 49-50) highlight Sarnoff Mednick's associative theory (The associative basis of the creative process, 1962) because it also provides a “Remote Associations Test” (RAT: Remote Associates Test) that operationalizes it by evaluating something common to all associative theories: the number and rarity of associations between ideas.

    To illustrate it, a mental structure (map) of data, objects and links is represented (on the left) in close, distant and remote contexts (according to their separation in the drawing). A hexagonal region (e.g. orange) contains data from related experiences, easy to associate. Between contiguous regions (yellow) the association is more distant and difficult. And among the non-adjacent ones (green) this one is considered “remote”. To the right of the figure is symbolized the RAT test, which presents three objects unrelated to the naked eye and asks to find a fourth object, which is related to each of them in different contexts whose remoteness is considered a measure of the subject's creativity.


    References:

    • Busse, T. V., & Mansfield, R. S. (1984). Teorías del proceso creador: revisión y perspectiva. (©. 2.-2. reservados, Ed.) Studies in Psychology = Estudios de Psicología, nº 18 (traducido del Journal of Creative Behavior, num. 2, vol. 14, 91-103, 1980), 47-57. Recuperado el 18 de diciembre de 2020, de https://dialnet.unirioja.es/ejemplar/7049
    • Mednick, S. A. (1962). The associative basis of the creative process. Psychological Review, 69, 220-232.
  3. Step 3: My graphic interpretation

    Associative Theory: Sarnoff Mednick (1962)


    Note. The RAT test (on the right) presents three stimuli and waits as “the solution” for their association with a fourth one located in increasingly distant contexts. Source: illustration by the author.


    Reference: all texts and images in this tutorial were extracted from the doctoral thesis cited below,

    • Valderrey, M.E. (2021), “Catalizadores Creativos en Ingeniería Conceptual: Evaluación de Habilidades Visuales y Verbales para Diseño Mecánico”. Propuesta de tesis doctoral, UNINI-México.


  4. Step 4: Links

    This tutorial comes from:

    Gestalt Theories: Max Wertheimer

    and continues in:

    Perceptual Theories: Ernest Schachtel

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