The effects of odor and cognitive stimulation on creativity in brainstorming

Ideas generated by people lies behind the production of new programs, technologies and instruments which ease peoples life. The brainstorming, which is technique aiming to enhance generation of ideas, is a common issue that was studied theoretically and practically. There are several methods in the literature to improve and facilitate idea generation in brainstorming. However, odor, as facilitating factor for brainstorming, has been hardly ever examined. For this purpose, the effects of odor and cognitive stimulation on creativity in brainstorming was studied in the first experiment. The participants generated ideas on increasing the productivity of a salesman by brainstorming. The participants in cognitive stimulation condition had cue words related to the problem. Odor was presented simultaneously with cue presentation and then secondly presented in the middle of the brainstorming session. It is assumed that cognitive cues and odor conditioned. Thus cognitive stimulation was triggered subsequent to odor presentation and an increase of number of generated ideas was observed. Additionally, participants in odor presentation condition generated more ideas in total and had higher flexibility score than participants in control condition. These findings discussed through odor effect on retrieval and associative memory. In the second experiment, there were cue words in all conditions. As distinct from the first experiment, odor was presented either before the session or in the middle of the session. As a result of this experiment, participants who had odor before the session were more successful in total flexibility scores than their counterparts. Besides, participants who had odor in both sessions generated more unique ideas and got higher flexibility scores than participants received odor in the middle of the session. These findings were explained with regard to verification of the first experiment and odor effects in the flexibility.