STRUCTURED IMAGINATION - THE ROLE OF CATEGORY STRUCTURE IN EXEMPLAR GENERATION

College students imagined animals that might live on a planet somewhere else in the galaxy. In the first experiment, they provided drawings and descriptions of their initial imagined animal, another member of the same species, and a member of a different species. The majority of imagined creatures were structured by properties that are typical of animals on earth: bilateral symmetry, sensory receptors, and appendages. Subjects also allowed shape, appendages and sense receptors to vary often across species but rarely within species. In Experiment 2, subjects' creations were influenced by correlated attributes; those told that the animal was feathered were more likely to produce creatures with wings and beaks, and those told it lived in water and had scales were more likely to produce creatures with fins and gills relative to subjects who were told the animal was furry or who were given no specific features. Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that many subjects approach the task by retrieving exemplars of known earth animals, but that instructions and task constraints can lead to greater use of broader knowledge frameworks. Experiment 5 revealed that the structuring found in college students' imagined animals also holds for extraterrestrials developed by science fiction writers. The results are consistent with the idea that similar structures and processes underlie creative and noncreative aspects of cognition, and are discussed in terms of the concept of structured imagination. That is, when subjects create a new member of a known category for an imaginary setting, their imagination is structured by a particular set of properties that are characteristic of that category. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.