The Effect of Expertise on Creative Problem Solving

The Effect of Expertise on Creative Problem Solving

This experimental study examined if experts' automatically activated domain-related knowledge would fixate experts' minds and make them less flexible in creative problem solving. Chinese GO players, 28 experts and 29 novices, solved 18 Remote Association Tasks (RATs, adapted from Mednick, 1962). The results revealed that the GO experts were less capable than GO novices in ignoring the irrelevant GO-related knowledge and searching for the RAT solutions in other relevant domains. These findings supported the hypothesized negative effect of expertise on creative problem solving. Further studies should be carried out to examine the effect of other structural characteristics of experts' knowledge network on creative problem solving.