Marily Oppezzo
People who walked instead of sat generated more novel and feasible ideas, reported Santa Clara University’s Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz of Stanford University.
Dan Schwartz
More than 175 volunteers completed well-validated assessments of creative thinking:
Guilford’s Alternate Uses (GAU) for common objects, created by University of Southern California’s J. P. Guilford, to measure of cognitive flexibility and divergent thinking,
JP Guilford
Edward Bowden
Compound Remote-Association test (CRA), developed by University of Wisconsin’s Edward Bowden and Mark Beeman of Northwestern to evaluate convergent thinking,
Barron’s Symbolic Equivalence Test (BSE), introduced by Frank Barron of University of California, Santa Cruz to calibrate the number of original insightful analogies generated for complex ideas.
Frank Barron
Oppezzo and Schwartz coded analogies according to a protocol developed by Northwestern’s Dedre Gentner to measure:
- Appropriateness,
- Novelty,
- Quality, determined by:
o Level of detail,
o Semantic proximity to the base statement,
o Relational mapping to the base statement.
Dedre Gentner
Walking was associated with increased divergent creativity on Guilford’s Alternate Uses (GAU) and improved convergent thinking measured by Compound Remote-Association test (CRA).
This trend significantly increased when volunteers walked outside and these participants produced the most novel and highest quality analogies.
Walkers generated an average of 60% more creative ideas than when seated.
People who walked were more talkative, and their greater verbal output was associated with more valid creative ideas.
Marc Berman
Participants generated more valid creative solutions when they walked first then sat for the next problem-solving session.
John Jonides
These effects may be explained by Attention Restoration Theory (ART), described by University of Michigan’s Marc G. Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan as two types of attention:
–Involuntary attention, captured by inherently intriguing stimuli,
-Voluntary or directed attention, directed by cognitive-control processes.
Stephen Kaplan
They suggested that walking in natural environments renews directed attention and improves performances on difficult tasks even when no longer walking.
Even viewing photographs of nature was associated with improved performance on a complex backwards digit-span task.
In contrast, walking in an urban walk requires directed attention to avoid obstacles and dangerous situations, and provides less opportunity to restore directed attention.
Jin Fan
After volunteers walked, they performed better on attentional function tasks on the Attention Network Test, developed by Jin Fan of Mount Sinai Medical School to evaluate:
-Alerting,
-Orienting,
-Executive attention.
Benefits of walking were not related to mood or weather conditions during four different seasons.
Friedrich Nietzsche
These studies validate Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation that “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” and walking in a natural setting before generating creative ideas.
Access to walking places in natural settings can enhance cognitive functioning and performance.
-*How effective have you found taking a brief walk outdoors before high-stakes discussions?
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©Kathryn Welds
Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary 