Cognitive Scaffold

Preparing your thinking workspace

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MENTAL MODEL · M10305

Alternative Uses Task

Alternative Uses Task
Learn & MetacognitionmediumCognitive Psychology
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Updated 2026-08-13

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INTRODUCTION

English translation pending.

CORE DEFINITION

In the classic divergent-thinking test, a participant is given an ordinary object, such as a brick, and asked to list as many unconventional uses for it as possible within a time limit. The responses are scored on fluency, the number of ideas, flexibility, the variety of categories they span, and originality, their rarity. The task deliberately withholds the object's conventional purpose, because the goal is to train the ability to see possibilities in an object beyond the function it was assigned.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

psychology

Reduce cognitive load

- Warm up randomly: pick any object and generate its uses under a fixed time limit. - Withhold the purpose: ignore the intended function so alternatives can appear. - Push past the obvious: keep generating until rare and strange uses begin to emerge.

anchor

Anchor fast decisions

Familiarity with an object's intended function suppresses every other reading of it, a constraint called functional fixedness. Forcing generation without judgment floods working memory with candidate uses, and once the common ones are exhausted, the search must reach into distant categories. The volume requirement is what does the work: original responses appear only after the obvious pool is drained, which is why fluency predicts originality.

MINIMUM ACTION

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Source support: Explicit

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    en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinkingZH · Explicit
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