Internet Use and Creative Thinking in the Alternative Uses Task

Abstract

Research has shown that using the Internet to access information can influence memory, metacognition, and how people choose to access information in the future. The current experiment sought to expand this line of work by investigating the impact of using the Internet on creative thinking. A total of 378 participants completed a version of the Alternative Uses Test in which they were asked to list five uncommon uses for each of four objects (e.g., a brick). Half of the participants did this on their own, without help from the Internet. The other half of the participants used the Internet to generate uses for the first two objects, and then generated uses for the last two objects without the Internet. Responses were considered on a number of measures (e.g., creativity, effectiveness, fluency, flexibility). Although creative performance was similar between the two conditions, some differences were observed, particularly with regard to the distributions of uses generated. For example, a subset of object uses generated by participants in the Internet condition were rarely generated by participants in the No Internet condition.