Creativity
Does walking a free path make people more creative?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Walking freely along a self-chosen path for two minutes improved creative idea generation in both young and older adults, but only when people both chose and physically walked the path.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Experiment 1 randomly assigned young adults to free walking, rectangular-path walking, generating a free path for someone else, or following someone else's random path for 2 minutes before an Alternative Uses Test; Experiment 2 compared free vs. rectangular walking in older adults.
- N
- Experiment 1: 64 undergraduates, 16 per condition. Experiment 2: 32 older adults aged over 65, 16 per condition. A cross-experiment analysis combined the walking groups.
- Population
- Undergraduates at National Taiwan University (Experiment 1) and community-dwelling older adults with relatively low education in Taiwan (Experiment 2)
- Outcome
- Fluency, flexibility and originality on the Alternative Uses Test for chopsticks; creativity-trait questionnaire, processing speed and task-switching as control measures
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Key findings
In young adults, only the free-walking group outperformed the rectangular-walking control, with large effects on fluency, flexibility and originality (effect sizes from r = 0.52 to 0.64); neither generating a free path without walking nor walking someone else's curvy path helped. Older adults who walked freely also scored higher on all three measures than those who walked the rectangle. Young adults scored higher than older adults overall, but older free walkers matched or, for originality, beat young adults in the rectangular condition. The groups did not differ on creativity traits, processing speed or switching.
Methodology
In Experiment 1, 64 students were randomly split into four groups while thinking about unusual uses for chopsticks: walking freely inside a taped rectangle, walking along the rectangle's edges, choosing a free path with a laser pointer for a partner, or walking the random path chosen by a partner. They then wrote as many uses as they could, and raters scored fluency, flexibility and originality. In Experiment 2, 32 older adults were randomly assigned to free or rectangular walking and did the same task aloud. Creativity traits, processing speed and task-switching were measured to check the groups were comparable.
Limitations
Each group had only 16 people, and the effect was measured immediately after a single 2-minute walk on one alternative-uses item, so how long the boost lasts or whether it transfers to real-world problem solving is unknown. The authors acknowledge the free-generation and random-path conditions may simply have failed to activate the metaphor or produce fluid movement, which weakens the claim that both elements are required. The cross-age comparison confounds age with education and the older adults answered aloud rather than in writing. Participants in the walking groups knew what kind of path they were walking, so expectation or demand effects cannot be fully ruled out.
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