Creativity researchers have recently sought to standardize idea assessment via computational measures of semantic distance: the degree of conceptual dissimilarity between words. The relationship between semantic distance and creativity has traditionally been described using linear models, with the embedded assumption that as semantic distance…

Cocreating meaning in collaboration is challenging. Success is often determined by people's abilities to coordinate their language to converge upon shared mental representations. Here we explore one set of low-level linguistic behaviors, linguistic alignment, that both emerges from, and facilitates, outcomes of high-level convergence. Linguistic…

In 1998, Plucker and Runco provided an overview of creativity assessment, noting current issues (fluency confounds, generality vs. specificity), recent advances (predictive validity, implicit theories), and promising future directions (moving beyond divergent thinking measures, reliance on batteries of assessments, translation into practice). In…

The ability to search memory for diverse contextual usages of words is proposed to play a role in creative idea generation. However, it is not yet known whether searching for more diverse contextual usages of words enhances the novelty of ideas during idea generation. In three experiments, participants were given a noun as a creativity prompt…

Novelty seeking has been found to affect creative performance, but its impact on the temporal dynamics of creative information processing remains unclear. Creative information is identified by two key indicators--novelty and appropriateness. To explore the effect of novelty seeking on the temporal processing of novelty and appropriateness, a…

This study investigated whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) targeting the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) can alter the thinking process and neural basis of creativity. Participants' performance on the compound remote associates (CRA) task was analyzed considering the semantic features of each trial after receiving different tDCS…

Understanding how creativity is judged in brief, structured texts is essential for exploring aesthetic and emotional engagement in minimalist art forms. Haiku and Senryu, two concise poetic genres, provide a unique lens to investigate how creativity is perceived under constraints of brevity. This study examines how readers' subjective experiences…

Associative thinking plays a major role in creativity, as it involves the ability to link distant concepts. Yet, the neural mechanisms allowing to combine distant associates in creative thinking tasks remain poorly understood. We investigated the whole-brain functional connectivity patterns related to combining remote associations for creative…

Creativity is an imperative skill for today's learners, one that has important contributions to issues of inclusion and equity in education. Therefore, assessing creativity is of major importance in educational contexts. However, scoring creativity based on traditional tools suffers from subjectivity and is heavily time- and labour-consuming. This…

The present research examined the varieties of poor metaphors to gain insight into the cognitive processes involved in generating creative ones. Drawing upon data from two published studies as well as a new sample, adults' open-ended responses to different metaphor prompts were categorized. Poor metaphors fell into two broad clusters.…

Automated scoring for divergent thinking (DT) seeks to overcome a key obstacle to creativity measurement: the effort, cost, and reliability of scoring open-ended tests. For a common test of DT, the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), the primary automated approach casts the problem as a semantic distance between a prompt and the resulting idea in a text…

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…

The Remote Associates Test (RAT; Mednick, 1962; Mednick & Mednick, 1967) is a commonly employed test of creative convergent thinking. The RAT is scored with a dichotomous scoring, scoring correct answers as 1 and all other answers as 0. Based on recent research into the information processing underlying RAT performance, we argued that the…

Education is central to the acquisition of knowledge, such as when children learn new concepts. It is unknown, however, whether educational differences impact not only what concepts children learn, but how those concepts come to be represented in semantic memory--a system that supports higher cognitive functions, such as creative thinking. Here we…

An increasing number of studies have explored the process of how subjects solve problems through remote association. Most research has investigated the relationship between an individual's response to semantic search during the think-aloud operation and the individual's reply performance. Few studies, however, have examined the process of…