Kutz, Arthur (2025) Creativity in Survival Processing: The Influence of Divergent and Convergent Thinking on the Survival Processing Advantage for Memory. Bachelor thesis, Psychology.
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Abstract
The survival processing advantage (SPA) suggests that processing information in terms of its relevance to survival leads to superior memory performance. This study aimed to replicate the SPA and investigate whether the two aspects of creativity, divergent and convergent thinking, play a role in this memory processing paradigm. Participants completed two rounds of judging the relevance of objects for two conditions (survival and moving), followed by an Alternative Uses Task, a surprise recall task, and a self-report Aha! experience questionnaire. Divergent thinking was measured through the Alternative Uses Task, and convergent thinking was operationalized through the co-occurrence of an Aha! experience and a Change of Mind (CoM), in particular, from first judging an item as irrelevant and then judging it as relevant in the second round. While the SPA was not statistically replicated, divergent thinking significantly predicted recall performance across conditions. Objects that were found to afford mixed relevance ratings in an earlier study, referred to as “ambiguous items”, were recalled better than objects of low- and high relevance. Additionally, ambiguous items elicited the highest rates of CoM and Aha! responses, particularly in the survival condition, but these insight-related phenomena did not predict the enhanced recall performance. The findings suggest that ambiguous objects may enhance memory independently of survival context, as they allow for richer and more elaborate encoding. Overall, this study reveals additional boundary conditions of the SPA and discusses the role of insight in adaptive memory research, as well as the implications of the results for the survival processing paradigm, and the richness-of-encoding hypothesis. Keywords: Survival processing advantage, Creativity, Divergent thinking, Aha!
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor) |
|---|---|
| Supervisor name: | Nieuwenstein, M.R. |
| Degree programme: | Psychology |
| Differentiation route: | None [Bachelor Psychology] |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Jul 2025 11:54 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Jul 2025 11:54 |
| URI: | http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/5569 |
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