Creative thinking, recognized as a fundamental life skill, is a complex process influenced by cognitive load. While literature has addressed the integration of cognitive load theory into creative thinking research, a comprehensive synthesis is lacking. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic review and deductive thematic analysis, drawing…

Divergent thinking (DT) ability is widely regarded as a central cognitive capacity underlying creativity, but its assessment is challenged by the fact that DT tasks yield a variable number of responses. Various approaches for the scoring of DT tasks have been proposed, which differ in how responses are evaluated and aggregated within a task. The…

The original 90-item Creative Behavior Inventory (CBI) was a landmark self-report scale in creativity research, and the 28-item brief form developed nearly 20 years ago continues to be a popular measure of everyday creativity. Relatively little is known, however, about the psychometric properties of this widely used scale. In the current research,…

Up to now, support for the idea that a controlled component exists in creative thought has mainly been supported by correlational studies; to further shed light on this issue, we employed an experimental approach. We used four alternate uses tasks that differed in instruction type ("be fluent" vs. "be creative") and concurrent…

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…

An underexplored aspect of the relationship between analogical reasoning and creativity is its phenomenology; in particular, the notion that analogical reasoning is related to insight and its associated "aha!" experience. However, the relationship between these phenomena has never been directly investigated. We adapted a set of verbal…

Creative thinking shares many characteristics with traditional complex tasks. We investigated whether implicit theories of creativity would affect creative thinking in a way similar to the impact of implicit theories of intelligence on academic tasks. We altered participants' theories of creativity to be either more incremental or more…

In this article we show how students' productive struggle on a mathematical task can lead to collective mathematical creativity. We use observable (co)actions and interactions from a video record that features three Grade 6 students in a problem-solving session to document the emergence of collective creativity leading to a solution. We discuss…

People often use spatial metaphors (e.g., think "laterally," "outside the box") to describe exploration of the problem space during creative problem solving. In this paper, we probe the potential cognitive underpinnings of these spatial metaphors. Drawing on theories of situative cognition, semantic foraging theory, and…

This paper examines how team creativity can be developed using the Synectics creative problem-solving approach by taking stickiness into account. Stickiness represents the difficulty learners experience in internalising knowledge and skills to perform a task productively. Using a quasi-experimental design learners' perceived change in team…