The "standard" definition of creativity as novel and useful describes creative products, but creativity is constituted by processes. This misalignment contributes to the oft-noted challenges of operationalizing creativity. Here, we distinguish creativity as a process from creativity as an attribute (i.e. "creative-ness").…

The role of top-down control in divergent creativity remains heavily debated. An outstanding question about the state dynamics of creativity concerns acute shifts between heightened and lowered creative states. Particularly, do transitions between creative states incur a "switch cost" as observed in other domains of cognition? Prior…

The compound Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a classic measure of creativity. Participants are shown three cue words (sore-shoulder-sweat) and asked to generate a word that connects them (cold). Theoretical views of RAT performance differ in the degree to which they conceptualize performance as depending on automatic spreading activation across…