The Epistemological Mechanism Of Epiphany: A Comparison Between The Elderly Students And The Poor Students

Creative thinking is a high-level cognitive activity, the emerging of creative thinking isclose contacted with our existing knowledge. It means that individual bases the existingknowledge or experience and overall thinking to produce unusual and valuable social newproduct. On the basis of Prototype Heuristics Theory, this passage discuss the influence ofdifferent knowledge representation to the solving of creative problems. The main content of thetheory is that people usually extract the knowledge about the current issues from their lives’established knowledge and experience, and if they match the current issues, they can solve theproblems. Prototype knowledge is the cognitive events that people get inspiration in the processof insight. When people are faced with an insight problem, they need to motivate properprototype and find the key inspired information. That is to say, the problem solving needs twoprocesses: prototype activation and problem solving. Prototype Heuristics Theory reveal theprofound nature of the creative thinking and it has been proved that it can be used in somestudies. And the explanation of this theory is more closed to our lives, so it has a higherecological validity. Besides, if there is significant difference between excellent students andstudents with learning disabilities in the creative problems solving abilities is an important studydirection.The hypothesis of the current study is that the levels of knowledge representation will leadto the difference of prototype activation and problem solving when individual learns theprototype knowledge. In experiment1, we used presentation type (prototype position andprototype quantity) as the independent variable and investigated the cognitive mechanism of theprototype elicitation effect in Scientific Inventional Experimental Problems of Library, and. Theaim was to study whether the prototype position effect and prototype automatic activation effectexist. Experiment2was deeper, and it regarded prototype identities and prototype learningsituation as different deep prototype representation knowledge to find out which representationwas the best way to solve the creative problems. The two experiments divided the students intotwo groups(one was excellent students and the other was students with learning disabilities). Thisis a new field that no one studied. The dependent variable was problem solving time, prototypeactivation rate and problem solving success rate. The main consequences of the this study wereas follows:(1) The main effect of prototype position reached a significant level, and the score forpost-prototype was higher than for former-prototype;(2) The main effect of prototype quantitywas not significant, which supported the view that prototype activation was automaticalprocessing.(3) The main effect of prototype identities reached a significant level, andprototypical knowledge with key inspired information is easier to motivate the proper prototypethan other identities.(4) The main effect of prototype situation reached a significant level, and proved the establishment of situational model had significantly influence to the prototypeinspired effect.(5) There was a significant interaction between students category and prototypeidentities, and the excellent students had the similar performance in three levels while studentswith learning disabilities was not.(6) There was a significant interaction between prototypesituation and prototype identities.(7）There was a significant interaction among students category,prototype identities and prototype situation.