Vaibhav Tyagi and Frank Loesche have successfully finished the first phase for their collaborative project with Prof. Mark Runco at University of Georgia, USA.
This project is also a part of Vaibhav’s secondment and aims to create new measures of creative thinking. Both Frank and Vaibhav are interested in measuring exact order and timing of idea generation to improve the current measures of divergent thinking, an important dimension of creative thinking. During a one month long experimental setup, they collected data from more than a hundred participants from in and around Georgia. Their experimental setup included asking people to generate alternate titles for famous movies and think about various alternate uses of common objects. They hope to create improved measures of creative thinking from this data by applying computational (and mathematical, by extension) techniques such as graph theoretical analysis. This in turn would allow their individual projects to more precisely capture creativity.
Prof. Runco is a leading creativity researcher and has been an influential figure in developing some of the most widely used tests and questionnaires in creativity research. He closely supervised Vaibhav and Frank’s project and also provided them with an inside look into Georgian lifestyle. They conducted their experiment in the famous Torrance Centre for Creativity & Talent Development. Their project was also featured on the website of the College of Education at the University of Georgia.