In a study conducted by Suntae Kim, a doctoral candidate and Associate Professor Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks at the University of Michigan, and Visiting Assistant Professor Evan Polman at the New York University, 104 SMU students were examined for their originality of ideas and the differences between these students and undergraduates at the New York University were striking. Students who walked freely were better at generating creative uses for the objects shown ? coming up with over 25% more original ideas. Such creativity was assessed in terms of fluency (the number of ideas generated), flexibility (the number of unique categories that described the generated ideas) and originality (as judged by independent raters).
The New York Times