{"pk":25539,"title":"Ideas in Dialogue: The Effects of Interaction on Creative Problem Solving","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Much problem-solving research has investigated if and why\n‘two heads are better than one’, but typically posits that if there\nis any process gain observed it is because of the exposure to the\nideas provided by another person’s attempted solutions. This\nwork fails to acknowledge or investigate what the interaction\nitself contributes to joint problem solving.\nUsing an online version of the Alternative Uses Task, we compare\nsituations in which people are passively exposed to what\nis said in a dialogue with situations in which people are actively\nengaged in the dialogue, thus varying the interactivity independently\nof the informational content that participants were\nexposed to.\nInteracting participants produce more turns overall, but they\ndo not come up with more ideas. Interacting participants were\nalso more likely to build on each other’s ideas and produce\nmore complex ideas when a turn is linked to a previous idea;\nfollowing leads to elaboration – but only if there is genuine\ninteractivity. These results indicate that conversational mechanisms\npromote the exploration of a problem space and that\nmerely counting the number of ideas produced would miss the\nimportance of the interaction itself.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"interaction; dialogue; creative problem-solving"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sx8281v","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Christine","middle_name":"","last_name":"Howes","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Gothenburg","department":""},{"first_name":"Patrick","middle_name":"G.T.","last_name":"Healey","name_suffix":"","institution":"Queen Mary University of London","department":""},{"first_name":"Pietro","middle_name":"","last_name":"Panzarasa","name_suffix":"","institution":"Queen Mary University of London","department":""},{"first_name":"Thomas","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hills","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Warwick","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25539/galley/15163/download/"}]}