Can exposure to ambiguous figures facilitate creativity?

Creativity can be defined as the “ability to produce something original and useful” (Wu et al., 2016, p.1). The world is currently filled with uncertainty and new challenges, which makes creative thinking more important than ever. 

Numerous studies have been conducted looking at factors associated with creativity. For example, having more multicultural experiences is positively related to creative performance (e.g., generating novel ideas) and cognitive processes which support creativity (e.g. using new ideas from unfamiliar cultures as inspiration) (Leung et al., 2008). However, only a small number of studies have investigated whether there are more direct ways to increase creative thinking. With that in mind, Wu and colleagues (2016) investigated whether it is possible to become more creative by getting into a thinking mode that encourages us to think from multiple perspectives. In particular, they wanted to see whether exposure to ambiguous figures “could directly induce a mindset that would transfer to the creative problem-solving”.

What are ambiguous figures?

According to the Oxford Dictionary an ambiguous figure is “an image the perception of which appears to oscillate or flip involuntarily between (usually) two alternatives, one perception or interpretation completely excluding the other while it persists”. A well-known example of this is the image below, “My Wife and My Mother-in-Law”, which depicts both an old woman looking off to the left and a young woman facing away, looking over her right shoulder. Which one can you see?

If you can’t see both follow the instructions from Illusions index below:

“If you see the young woman: look at the young woman’s chin and think of it as a large nose, and look at the young woman’s ear and think of it as an eye. If you see the old woman: look at the old woman’s nose, and think of it as the left cheek of a face looking away from you, and look at the old woman’s eye and think of it as an ear on a face looking away from you.”

Why does this happen? There is no simple answer. Scientific studies on this matter have been carried out for over 200 years and various explanations have been offered. There are two main approaches: a bottom-up (or sensory) and a top-down (or cognitive) one. The bottom-up theories suggest that we switch from one representation to the other due to adaptation processes that occur at the neural level (Intaite et al., 2013). Put (very) simply, the neurons (brain cells) processing the representation we perceive get fatigued and as a result, the ones processing the alternative interpretation take over. Top-down theories propose that the switch is the result of higher cognitive functions such as attention, expectation, decision-making, and learning (Kornmeier & Bach, 2012). Research suggests that both bottom-up and top-down processes are responsible for the way we experience ambiguous figures.

Does exposure to ambiguous figures increase creativity?

Wu and colleagues conducted two experiments to find out. In the first one, they examined whether presenting ambiguous figures to participants would improve their performance in an Alternate (or alternative) Uses Task. In this task, participants have to come up with as many uses as possible for a simple everyday object, such as a paperclip or a brick, in a limited period of time (e.g., 2 minutes). Participants are being scored on four categories: 

• Fluency: how many alternative uses did they come up with? 
• Originality: were those uses unique or were they also mentioned by other participants?
• Flexibility: did the generated uses cover a wide range of ideas from different categories?
• Elaboration: how much detail did they provide for each use? 

Wu et al. found that “being exposed to ambiguous figures significantly enhanced participants’ performance in the dimension of fluency, flexibility, and originality than those exposed to non-ambiguous figures.” 

The second experiment was focused on the effect of ambiguous figures on a number of creative story generation tasks. Participants viewed a set of ambiguous or non-ambiguous figures (4 seconds per image) and then were asked to make up a brief story with three unrelated words (e.g., rose, desert, and duck). Results showed participants generated more creative stories in the ambiguous figure condition further suggesting the facilitative effect ambiguous figures have on creative problem-solving.

Ambiguous figures as cues in Design

I know what you’re thinking. How does this help us? Both experiments described above took place in the lab and used unnatural creativity tasks. Can exposure to ambiguity help us be more creative in our everyday problem-solving? 

Tseng (2018) took Wu et al.’s findings a step further by conducting two experiments with novice and experienced designers. They examined whether using unstructured, ambiguous figures as design cues can help participants design a novel table. More specifically, the participants (experienced or novice designers) were given a number of ambiguous figures ( with high, moderate, or low ambiguity) and were required to use them as the starting point for their design activity. According to Tseng (2018), the experimental set-up was a way to represent the way designers often have to work in early concept design.

The main findings of the study were the following:

• Expert designers were able to create more design ideas and interpretations than novices suggesting that as one would expect expert designers are “highly skilled at working with visual materials in order to generate design ideas”. 
• A significant interaction was found between the level of expertise and visual ambiguity in the production and the interpretation of design ideas. In particular, expert designers generated more ideas and interpretations as the ambiguity increased. No effect of ambiguity was observed in novice designers.

The results suggest that experienced designers appear to be highly sensitive to the ambiguity that is inherent in visual stimuli, and this has a big effect on their creative process and idea generation during the early stage of design development. 

“We argue that the cognitive uncertainty engendered by ambiguous figures may inspire designers to search for substitute information in order to reduce this sense of uncertainty. With higher degrees of uncertainty the designer has greater freedom to search for more diverse ways to resolve presented ambiguities, thereby leading to innovations during the process of concept development.” — Tseng, 2018

It is worth noting that in this study novice designers in the study were undergraduate students in design, while experienced designers were graduate and PhD students. It’s not clear how much experience one should have to be an “experienced” designer. Future research should further examine this. In the meantime, it looks like ambiguous figures could be a way to facilitate creative problem-solving. You can try it yourself! Why not kick off a future workshop or meeting by showing attendees a few ambiguous figures? 

References

Intaitė, M., Noreika, V., Šoliūnas, A., & Falter, C. M. (2013). Interaction of bottom-up and top-down processes in the perception of ambiguous figures. Vision Research, 89, 24-31.

Kornmeier, J., & Bach, M. (2012). Ambiguous figures–what happens in the brain when perception changes but not the stimulus. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 6, 51.

Leung, A. K. Y., Maddux, W. W., Galinsky, A. D., & Chiu, C. Y. (2008). Multicultural experience enhances creativity: the when and how. American psychologist, 63(3), 169.

Tseng, W. S. W. (2018). Can visual ambiguity facilitate design ideation?. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 28(2), 523-551.

Wu, X., Gu, X., & Zhang, H. (2019). The facilitative effects of ambiguous figures on creative solution. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 53(1), 44-51.