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The Incubative Effect of Sleep on Creative Problem Solving

Author: ChenXiaoMei
Tutor: ZhangHao
School: Southwestern University
Course: Basic Psychology
Keywords: Creative problem solving Sleep Incubation effect Incubation state
CLC: B842
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2013
Downloads: 27
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Abstract

The idea that successful solutions can be gained through a break can be observed in real-world, that is the incubation effect. Incubation effect could play an important role for problem solving. Some research had investigated subject’s performance on regular problem as well as creative problem. Previous research found that the length of incubation period makes an important role of incubation effect on problem solving. For example Goldman, et al. used anagrams to examine the effects of incubation periods including0-second,20-minutes,24-hour. The result showed that during the last35seconds of response, the participants in the24-hour incubation condition solved significantly more unsolved anagrams than those in the0-second condition, whereas those in the20-minute condition did not differ from the0-second condition. Thus they suggest that longer periods of incubation would lead to an increased facilitation of anagram problem solving. However, Most of these research focus on the wake incubation state. The important of the sleep incubation state on incubation effect has been ignored. Sleep is the physiologic and psychologic need for the human, it makes a significant role on our life. Sleep could promote organism growth and maintain organism survival. More importantly, sleep can consolidate memory, enhance cognitive flexibility and creative insight and divergent thinking. Creativity is the fountain head of human civilizations. Prior research indicated that sleep is associated with creativity, especially a positive relationship between CAP Al and creativity. Wanger et al.(2004) have elegantly demonstrated that sleep could effective to inspire insight of digital type problem after initial representation. However, these research ignore to investigate the impact of sleep on unsolved creative problem.It was hypothesized that participants would complete more unsolved creative problems after receive a nocturnal sleep between initial and second attempt of a verbal creativity task than after an equal interval with the night-time wakefulness or daytime wakefulness. Remote associate theory states that creative is an ability of association of scattered, unrelated things. Creating process is the process of reintegration elements according to some requests. The association of words whose level of associative strength among them is higher within a semantic network, was more creative. The more association is built among remote things, the more creative the people are. To investigate the incubation effect of the nocturnal sleep on unsolved creative problems, we use the RAT which were designed as measures of creativity, a classic and widely used measure the role of incubation in creative problem solving. The experiment utilized a2(incubation period:incubation vs. non-incubation)×3(incubation state:wake, sleep, deprivation) between-participants design. Eighty-four healthy college students (age M=21.32, SD=1.94) at the Southwest University participated in the experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to one of six conditions:wake incubation group, sleep incubation group, deprivation incubation group, wake non-incubation group, sleep non-incubation group, or deprivation non-incubation group. Between the two sessions, a10-hour period of wake, sleep, or deprivation was inserted. In incubation conditions, there were180RATs presented in the first session. The same180RATs were presented in the second session. In non-incubation conditions, to match procedure of incubation conditions, the Arithmetic Task was presented in the first session, because such task was not related to subsequent RAT. The180RATs were presented in the second session.Some important findings were gotten in the research as following:The completion rate at the incubation condition was more than that at the non-incubation condition. These are consistent with previous studies of incubation.There was a significant difference between wake, sleep, and deprivation at incubation condition [F(2,39)=4.65, p<0.05]. Follow-up multiple comparisons using the LSD test showed, that the completion rate in the sleep group (M=0.26, SD=0.05) was higher than that in the wake group (M=0.22, SD=0.03, p<.05), and the deprivation group (M=0.21, SD=0.05, p<.01). Findings here suggest that sleep plays a crucial role in the incubative process of creative problem solving.For the memory storage repeated prior memory experiments, found the accuracy in the sleep group (M=0.88, SD=0.04) was higher than that in both the wake group (M=0.83, SD=0.05, p<.05), and the deprivation group (M=0.79, SD=0.07, p<.01). These repeated prior studies of consolidation of memory from sleep.In conclusion, these finding confirmed that participants would complete more unsolved creative problems after receive a nocturnal sleep between initial and second attempt of a verbal creativity task than after an equal interval with the night-time wakefulness or daytime wakefulness. Sleep is a specific physiological state characterized by reduced or absent consciousness. It may play a role in the processing of information acquired while awake. During sleep by restructuring new memory representations, facilitates the creative problem solving.

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