| Scope and method of study. The continued usefulness after thousands of years of such basic inventions as dishware and digging tools underscores the potential importance of the mental processes involved in inventing them. A quasi-historical approach, which studies the perceptions of contemporary subjects regarding the development of existing related inventions, was used to gain a conceptual organization of the inventive process. Experiment 1 involved subjects ranking four types of dishes (plate, bowl, cup, and glass) in the perceived order of natural development. Experiment 2 asked subjects to rate the likelihood that each of the dish types originated from different sources (plant, human, animal, or inanimate parts). Experiment 3 involved rating the plausibility of a change between the dish types in pairs (e.g., moving from a plate to a bowl). Experiment 4 asked subjects to rate the likelihood that the change between dish pairs was motivated by food temperature (hot/cold) and consistency (solid/liquid). Experiment 5 involved subjects identifying heuristics used to move from one dish type to another. Some of the experiments also involved duplicate studies with four types of digging tools to generalize the findings beyond the inventions of dishware.;Findings and conclusions. Across the experiments, subjects strongly agreed in their perceptions of the invention process. The results suggested that: (1) people think of some related inventions as linked in sequential timelines, or natural pathways, that progress from simple to complex artifacts, (2) organic origins are more plausible than inanimate origins for simple, early inventions, (3) the function a new artifact is to serve is seen as a motivating factor behind its invention, and (4) the heuristics used in the change between two related inventions are readily recognizable. |
