The Dynamics of Creative Ideation: Introducing a New Assessment Paradigm

Controlling stimulus ambiguity reduces spurious creative ideation variance in a cyclic adaptation of the alternative uses task

In the alternative uses task (AUT), a well-established creativity assessment, participants propose alternative uses for common items (e.g., a brick) within a 2-3 min timeframe. While idea evaluation is likely involved, the emphasis is strongly on idea generation. Here, we test the value of presenting a word overlapping an image compared to a word only prompt, and we introduce a cyclic adaptation of the AUT explicitly calling on participants to choose their best idea. In Experiment 1, as compared to word only, word + image prompts increased idea fluency but reduced idea originality and variability within a group of native Polish speakers. Thus, word + image prompts improve AUT baselining. In Experiment 2, different participants produced as many ideas as possible within two minutes (List) or their single best idea at the end of each of three 30 s ideation cycles (Cycle). Although originality did not differ between List and Cycle overall, the first three ideas in List were rated as less creative than the ideas in Cycle. Overall, we conclude that using disambiguating images reduces spurious interindividual variability in the AUT while introducing idea evaluation in the task allows us to assess creativity beyond idea generation.

Adipose tissue in cortisol excess: What Cushing's syndrome can teach us?

Endogenous Cushing's syndrome (CS) is a rare condition due to prolonged exposure to elevated circulating cortisol levels that features its typical phenotype characterised by moon face, proximal myopathy, easy bruising, hirsutism in females and a centripetal distribution of body fat. Given the direct and indirect effects of hypercortisolism, CS is a severe disease burdened by increased cardio-metabolic morbidity and mortality in which visceral adiposity plays a leading role. Although not commonly found in clinical setting, endogenous CS is definitely underestimated leading to delayed diagnosis with consequent increased rate of complications and reduced likelihood of their reversal after disease control. Most of all, CS is a unique model for systemic impairment induced by exogenous glucocorticoid therapy that is commonly prescribed for a number of chronic conditions in a relevant proportion of the worldwide population. In this review we aim to summarise on one side, the mechanisms behind visceral adiposity and lipid metabolism impairment in CS during active disease and after remission and on the other explore the potential role of cortisol in promoting adipose tissue accumulation.

AuDrA: An automated drawing assessment platform for evaluating creativity

The visual modality is central to both reception and expression of human creativity. Creativity assessment paradigms, such as structured drawing tasks Barbot (2018), seek to characterize this key modality of creative ideation. However, visual creativity assessment paradigms often rely on cohorts of expert or naïve raters to gauge the level of creativity of the outputs. This comes at the cost of substantial human investment in both time and labor. To address these issues, recent work has leveraged the power of machine learning techniques to automatically extract creativity scores in the verbal domain (e.g., SemDis; Beaty & Johnson 2021). Yet, a comparably well-vetted solution for the assessment of visual creativity is missing. Here, we introduce AuDrA - an Automated Drawing Assessment platform to extract visual creativity scores from simple drawing productions. Using a collection of line drawings and human creativity ratings, we trained AuDrA and tested its generalizability to untrained drawing sets, raters, and tasks. Across four datasets, nearly 60 raters, and over 13,000 drawings, we found AuDrA scores to be highly correlated with human creativity ratings for new drawings on the same drawing task (r = .65 to .81; mean = .76). Importantly, correlations between AuDrA scores and human raters surpassed those between drawings' elaboration (i.e., ink on the page) and human creativity raters, suggesting that AuDrA is sensitive to features of drawings beyond simple degree of complexity. We discuss future directions, limitations, and link the trained AuDrA model and a tutorial ( https://osf.io/kqn9v/ ) to enable researchers to efficiently assess new drawings.

The Language of Creativity: Evidence from Humans and Large Language Models

Recent developments in computerized scoring via semantic distance have provided automated assessments of verbal creativity. Here, we extend past work, applying computational linguistic approaches to characterize salient features of creative text. We hypothesize that, in addition to semantic diversity, the degree to which a story includes perceptual details, thus transporting the reader to another time and place, would be predictive of creativity. Additionally, we explore the use of generative language models to supplement human data collection and examine the extent to which machine-generated stories can mimic human creativity. We collect 600 short stories from human participants and GPT-3, subsequently randomized and assessed on their creative quality. Results indicate that the presence of perceptual details, in conjunction with semantic diversity, is highly predictive of creativity. These results were replicated in an independent sample of stories (n = 120) generated by GPT-4. We do not observe a significant difference between human and AI-generated stories in terms of creativity ratings, and we also observe positive correlations between human and AI assessments of creativity. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Automatic assessment of divergent thinking in Chinese language with TransDis: A transformer-based language model approach

Language models have been increasingly popular for automatic creativity assessment, generating semantic distances to objectively measure the quality of creative ideas. However, there is currently a lack of an automatic assessment system for evaluating creative ideas in the Chinese language. To address this gap, we developed TransDis, a scoring system using transformer-based language models, capable of providing valid originality (novelty) and flexibility (variety) scores for Alternative Uses Task (AUT) responses in Chinese. Study 1 demonstrated that the latent model-rated originality factor, comprised of three transformer-based models, strongly predicted human originality ratings, and the model-rated flexibility strongly correlated with human flexibility ratings as well. Criterion validity analyses indicated that model-rated originality and flexibility positively correlated to other creativity measures, demonstrating similar validity to human ratings. Study 2 and 3 showed that TransDis effectively distinguished participants instructed to provide creative vs. common uses (Study 2) and participants instructed to generate ideas in a flexible vs. persistent way (Study 3). Our findings suggest that TransDis can be a reliable and low-cost tool for measuring idea originality and flexibility in Chinese language, potentially paving the way for automatic creativity assessment in other languages. We offer an open platform to compute originality and flexibility for AUT responses in Chinese and over 50 other languages ( https://osf.io/59jv2/ ).

A systematic framework of creative metacognition

Creative cognition does not just involve cognitive processes in direct service of the main task objective (e.g., idea generation), but also metacognitive processes that monitor and regulate cognition adaptively (e.g., evaluation of ideas and task performance, or development and selection of task strategies). Although metacognition is vital for creative performance, relevant work is sparse, which may be partly due to persistent ambiguities in the theoretical conceptualization of creative metacognition. Therefore, this article proposes a systematic framework of creative metacognition (CMC), which builds on recent advancements in metacognition theory and extends them to meet the specifics of creative cognition. The CMC framework consists of two dynamic components-monitoring and control-and a more static component of metacognitive knowledge, each subsuming metacognitive processes applying to the level of task, performance, and responses. We describe the presumed function of these metacognitive components in the creative process, present evidence in support of each, and discuss their association with related constructs, such as creative self-beliefs. We further highlight the dynamic interplay of metacognitive processes across task performance and identify promising avenues for future research.

Identifying the factors affecting strategic decision-making ability to boost the entrepreneurial performance: A hybrid structural equation modeling – artificial neural network approach

This study builds a conceptual model of strategic decision-making ability that leads to entrepreneurial performance (EP) based on the two-system decision-making theory and logical analysis. An empirical approach using structural equation modeling – artificial neural network (SEM-ANN) was performed to describe the linear and nonlinear relationships in the proposed model. The empirical results reveal that strategic decision-making abilities are affected by five factors: attention, memory, thinking, emotion, and sentiment, and whose influence mechanisms and degrees are varied. Results also describe that these abilities have a positive effect on overall EP. Therefore, results suggest that businesses’ strategic decision-making is usually strengthened when entrepreneurs have a clear understanding of these influencing elements, and the interaction between them leads to improved performance.

The ambulatory battery of creativity: Additional evidence for reliability and validity

Psychometrically sound instruments that assess temporal dynamics of creative abilities are limited. The Ambulatory Battery of Creativity (ABC) is designed to assess creative ideation performance multiple times in everyday life and was proven to capture the intra-individual dynamic of creative abilities reliably and validly. The present ambulatory study aimed to replicate and extend the psychometric evidence of the novel ABC. Sixty-nine participants worked on the ABC during a 5-day ambulatory assessment protocol. Each day, participants completed six randomly presented items of the verbal and the figural ABC. Matching previous psychometric analyses, the results indicated good between-person (≥0.80) and good within-person (≥0.72) reliability. Furthermore, evidence for between-person and within-person validity of the ABC was obtained. Performance in the verbal and the figural ABC were interrelated and correlated with an independent measure of creative potential. The verbal ABC was further associated with openness, self-reported creative behavior, creative activities, and creative achievements, thus providing additional evidence of construct validity, especially for the verbal ABC. Finally, the verbal and the figural ABC yielded convincing within-person validity: Longer response times and higher subjective originality ratings were associated with more original ideas. This replication and extension of the ABC’s psychometric properties indicates that it enables a reliable and valid assessment of moment-to-moment fluctuations of creative ideation abilities in everyday life, which may facilitate the investigation of exciting new research questions related to dynamic aspects of creative ability.

The interplay of ADHD characteristics and executive functioning with the GPA and divergent thinking of engineering students: A conceptual replication and extension

Characteristics of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and executive functioning difficulties have been found to correspond with poorer academic outcomes on the one hand and enhanced divergent thinking on the other hand. The current study was conducted to better understand the relationship between ADHD characteristics, executive functioning difficulties, divergent thinking, and academic outcomes by conceptually replicating and expanding on a previous study. Undergraduate engineering students (N = 199) at a public university in the northeastern United States completed self-report measures of ADHD characteristics and daily executive functioning, as well as divergent thinking (figural and verbal) and intelligence quotient (IQ) tests. The results of a series of multiple regression models showed that (1) executive functioning difficulties negatively, and non-verbal IQ and figural divergent thinking positively, predicted engineering grade point average (GPA; obtained from the university registrar’s office), (2) GPA and verbal IQ positively predicted figural divergent thinking scores, and (3) verbal IQ positively predicted verbal divergent thinking scores. A series of multiple regression models testing the assertion that controlling for IQ would strengthen the relationship between divergent thinking and ADHD characteristics or executive functioning were not supported but did show associations between select components of characteristics and divergent thinking. Taken together, these results support previous conclusions that students with ADHD characteristics and executive functioning difficulties may struggle academically yet exhibit select enhanced divergent thinking abilities.

Ecological Momentary Assessment of Creative Ideation

Abstract. Creative ideas in daily life show substantial variation in quality. Yet, most studies investigate the creative ideation process in highly controlled laboratory contexts, which challenges the ecological validity of creativity research findings. In this article, we advocate the use of ambulatory assessments of creative ideation to gain deeper insight into the variability of ideation processes (between- and within-subjects) in everyday life. We demonstrate this approach by the example of the ambulatory battery of creativity (ABC), which constitutes a reliable and valid approach to assess divergent thinking ability in the verbal and figural domain in everyday life context. Furthermore, it differentiates between-person and within-person variation of creative ideation performance. The first part of this paper will shortly describe the general approach using ABC as an example. In the second part, we use the 7 C’s heuristic to explore applications and implications of this novel method for creativity research. We focus on four C’s with special relevance for ambulatory assessment: Creator, Creating, Context, and Curricula. To this end, we review the findings of strongly controlled laboratory studies and discuss and illustrate applications of the ambulatory assessment. We conclude that the assessment of creative ideation performance in the field might help move the spotlight of creative ideation research from the laboratory to more naturalistic settings. This would increase the ecological validity of creative ideation research and facilitate fresh or unprecedented perspectives on past and future questions on a person’s creative potential and its moment-to-moment fluctuation.

The Dynamic Creativity Framework

Abstract. The dynamic creativity framework (DCF) represents a new theoretical perspective for studying the creativity construct. This framework is based on the dynamic definition of creativity, and it has both theoretical and empirical implications. From a theoretical point of view, we review the characteristics of the dynamic creative process and its extension into the dynamic universal creative process, encompassing creativity at different layers of complexity. We discuss the key concept of creative potential, considering individual, sociocultural, and material viewpoints, and we show how the DCF is instrumental in clarifying the relationship between creativity and intelligence, between creativity and anticipation, as well as in introducing the concept of ‘organic creativity’. From the empirical perspective, we focus on the dynamic creative process broken down into four phases: i) drive, ii) information, iii) idea generation, iv) idea evaluation. We review results obtained through investigations accounting for the dynamic interplay between emotional and cognitive components defining creative performance for each. Experiments were conducted to measure the role of emotions and attention in driving the dynamic process, considering the processing of apparently irrelevant information and the interaction between idea generation and idea evaluation, always taking into account individual differences as measured through personality traits, performance variables, or lifetime achievement. Neurophysiological evidence is considered in discussing dynamic effects in divergent thinking, such as the serial order effect, as well as the possibility to enhance creative potential through neurofeedback. Finally, we report on the effects of different environments on the creative process, highlighting the dynamics produced by context-embeddedness.

Intra-Individual Variability in Creativity

Abstract. Individual differences perspectives have dominated the scientific study of creativity since the 1950’s. These perspectives, however, mainly emphasize group-level variations or inter-individual differences, with limited interest in individual-level variations. Yet, (1) group-level findings are often used to make inferences at the person-level, which might not apply consistently across individuals, and (2) a focus on intra-individual variations could supplement knowledge based on inter-individual differences and accurately inform creativity as a dynamic and multifaceted psychological construct. Indeed, when observed at the individual level, creativity can vary from moment to moment, task to task, and even item to item, which is not well reflected in the current understanding of creativity. After introducing the historical context for the study of individual differences in creativity, this article presents and illustrates three fundamental and distinct aspects of intra-individual variability as they apply to creativity, namely (in)consistency (or processing fluctuation), dispersion, and intraindividual change. While doing so, recent developments in apparatus and methods to assess creativity as a more dynamic phenomenon are presented. The article concludes by discussing the promise of accounting for intra-individual variability in creative performance and potential and the new knowledge it may elicit for both creativity research and practice.

A new method for training creativity: narrative as an alternative to divergent thinking

Creativity is a major source of innovation, growth, adaptability, and psychological resilience, making it a top priority of governments, global corporations, educational institutions, and other organizations that collectively invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually into training. The current foundation of creativity training is the technique known as divergent thinking; yet for decades, concerns have been raised about the adequacy of divergent thinking: it is incongruent with the creative processes of children and most adult creatives, and it has failed to yield expected downstream results in creative production. In this article, we present an alternative approach to creativity training, based in neural processes different from those involved in divergent thinking and drawing upon a previously unused resource for creativity research: narrative theory. We outline a narrative theory of creativity training; illustrate with examples of training and assessment from our ongoing work with the U.S. Department of Defense, Fortune 50 companies, and graduate and professional schools; and explain how the theory can help fill prominent lacunae and gaps in existing creativity research, including the creativity of children, the psychological mechanisms of scientific and technological innovation, and the failure of computer artificial intelligence to replicate human creativity.

Understanding ideational fluency as a survival process

BACKGROUND

When students generate ideas, important inter-individual variance exists both in the quantity and the quality of ideas they are able to produce (e.g., perfectionists who have few highly creative ideas or mass producers who produce a lot of uncreative ideas). In educational psychology research on creativity, the relation between the quantity and quality of ideas has not been well understood, limiting progress in this area.

AIMS

We conceptualized Ideational Fluency as a phenomenon that requires participants to 'survive' to produce more ideas, and where dropping out of the ideational process was analogous to 'dying'. Using this novel paradigm, we aimed to test the relations among Fluency (as a dependent variable); and creative Expertise, Originality and self-reported Personality attributes (as independent variables).

SAMPLE AND METHOD

Participants were drawn from three groups: those with demonstrated expertise in stage or screen acting (n = 104); undergraduates being trained in the same domain (n = 100), and adults with no acting training or experience (n = 92). Participants responded to the Alternate Uses Task; Non-parametric and semi-parametric survival models were fit to their Ideational Fluency; and average and maximum Originality scores, as well as self-reported Personality attributes, were used as covariates.

RESULTS

Across all participants, the Ideational Fluency survival function showed an S-shape, but the Expertise grouping interacted with that pattern. The survival rate of professional actors decreased more rapidly during the first few ideas, but after the 5th idea, professional actors displayed a clear advantage in survival rate. Participants who were less original on average but who showed a high maximum Originality, as well as those participants who reported more Assertiveness and less Industriousness, also survived further into the Ideational process.

CONCLUSIONS

Contrary to our hypothesis, professional actors' advantage in Fluency did not manifest in the survival model until after the 5th idea generated. A quantity-quality trade-off was observed with average Originality being associated with shorter survival, but that trade-off was not observed with maximum Originality, which was associated with longer survival.

The More Fertile, the More Creative: Changes in Women's Creative Potential across the Ovulatory Cycle

Creative thinking is a defining human feature. It provides novel solutions and as such undoubtedly has contributed to our survival. However, according to signaling theory, creativity could also have evolved through sexual selection as a potential fitness indicator. In our study, we tested one implication of this theory. Specifically, we hypothesized that if creativity can serve as a signal of women’s fitness, then we should observe an increase in creative thinking in the fertile phase of the ovulatory cycle compared to other non-fertile phases. In our study (N = 751), we tested creative potential throughout the ovulatory cycle. We found a positive correlation between the probability of conception and both creative originality and flexibility. Importantly, we also tested the mediating role of arousal in the relationship between the probability of conception and creative thinking. The results of our study are discussed in terms of signaling theory, through which women advertise their fitness with their creativity.

Automating creativity assessment with SemDis: An open platform for computing semantic distance

Creativity research requires assessing the quality of ideas and products. In practice, conducting creativity research often involves asking several human raters to judge participants' responses to creativity tasks, such as judging the novelty of ideas from the alternate uses task (AUT). Although such subjective scoring methods have proved useful, they have two inherent limitations-labor cost (raters typically code thousands of responses) and subjectivity (raters vary on their perceptions and preferences)-raising classic psychometric threats to reliability and validity. We sought to address the limitations of subjective scoring by capitalizing on recent developments in automated scoring of verbal creativity via semantic distance, a computational method that uses natural language processing to quantify the semantic relatedness of texts. In five studies, we compare the top performing semantic models (e.g., GloVe, continuous bag of words) previously shown to have the highest correspondence to human relatedness judgements. We assessed these semantic models in relation to human creativity ratings from a canonical verbal creativity task (AUT; Studies 1-3) and novelty/creativity ratings from two word association tasks (Studies 4-5). We find that a latent semantic distance factor-comprised of the common variance from five semantic models-reliably and strongly predicts human creativity and novelty ratings across a range of creativity tasks. We also replicate an established experimental effect in the creativity literature (i.e., the serial order effect) and show that semantic distance correlates with other creativity measures, demonstrating convergent validity. We provide an open platform to efficiently compute semantic distance, including tutorials and documentation ( https://osf.io/gz4fc/ ).

EEG signals respond differently to idea generation, idea evolution and evaluation in a loosely controlled creativity experiment

Many neurocognitive studies endeavor to understand neural mechanisms of basic creative activities in strictly controlled experiments. However, little evidence is available regarding the neural mechanisms of interactions between basic activities underlying creativity in such experiments. Moreover, strictly controlled experiments might limit flexibility/freedom needed for creative exploration. Thus, this study investigated the whole-brain neuronal networks' interactions between three modes of thinking: idea generation, idea evolution, and evaluation in a loosely controlled creativity experiment. The loosely controlled creativity experiment will provide a degree of flexibility/freedom for participants to incubate creative ideas through extending response time from a few seconds to 3 min. In the experiment, participants accomplished a modified figural Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT-F) while their EEG signals were recorded. During idea generation, a participant was instructed to complete a sketch that was immediately triggered by a sketch stimulus at first sight. During idea evolution, a participant was instructed to complete a sketch that is radically distinctive from what was immediately triggered by the sketch stimulus. During the evaluation, a participant was instructed to evaluate difficulties of thinking and drawing during idea generation and evolution. It is expected that participants would use their experience to intuitively complete a sketch during idea generation while they could use more divergent and imaginative thinking to complete a possible creative sketch during idea evolution. Such an experimental design is named as a loosely controlled creativity experiment, which offers an approach to studying creativity in an ecologically valid manner. The validity of the loosely controlled creativity experiment could be verified through comparing its findings on phenomena that have been effectively studied by validated experimental research. It was found from our experiment that alpha power decreased significantly from rest to the three modes of thinking. These findings are consistent with that from visual creativity research based on event-related (de)synchronization (ERD/ERS) and task-related power changes (TRP). Specifically, in the lower alpha band (8-10 Hz), the decreases of alpha power were significantly lower over almost the entire scalp during idea evolution compared to the other modes of thinking. This finding indicated that idea evolution requires less general attention demands than the other two modes of thinking since the lower alpha ERD has been reported as being more likely to reflect general task demands such as attentional processes. In the upper alpha band (10-12 Hz), the decreases of alpha power were significantly higher over central sites during the evaluation compared to idea evolution. This finding indicated that evaluation involves more task-specific demands since the upper alpha ERD has been found as being more likely to reflect task-specific demands such as memory and intelligence, as was defined in the literature. In addition, new findings were obtained since the loosely controlled creativity experiment could activate multiple brain networks to accomplish the tasks involving the three modes of thinking. EEG microstate analysis was used to structure the unstructured EEG data to detect the activation of multiple brain networks. Combined EEG-fMRI and EEG source localization studies have indicated that EEG microstate classes are closely associated with the resting-state network as identified using fMRI. It was found that the default mode network was more active during idea evolution compared to the other two modes of thinking, while the cognitive control network was more active during the evaluation compared to the other two modes of thinking. This finding indicated that idea evolution might be more associated with unconscious and internal directed attention processes. Taken together, the loosely controlled creativity experiment with the support of EEG microstate analysis appears to offer an effective approach to investigating the real-world complex creativity activity.

Functional coupling of brain networks during creative idea generation and elaboration in the figural domain

The neuroscientific investigation of creative cognition has advanced by considering the functional connectivity between brain regions and its dynamic changes over time, which are consistent with stages in the ideation process. Surprisingly, although the communication between neuronal networks takes place in a time-scale of milliseconds, EEG studies investigating a time-course in cortico-cortical communication during creative ideation are rare and findings are typically restricted to the verbal domain. Therefore, this study examined functional coupling using EEG (task-related phase-locking in the upper-alpha range) during creative thinking in the figural domain. Using an innovative computerized experimental paradigm, we specifically investigated the stage of idea generation and the stage of idea elaboration in an adapted picture completion task. The findings confirmed a hypothesized increase of functional coupling from idea generation to elaboration, which was most pronounced in frontal-central as well as frontal-temporal networks. The connectivity in the frontal-parietal/occipital network already increased during idea generation and remained constant during elaboration. Importantly, more original participants generally showed higher functional connectivity in all brain networks. This elevated functional coupling with frontal brain regions might reflect increased executive processes related to internal attention, motor planning, and semantic selection processes supporting highly original thought in the figural domain.

Scrutinizing the basis of originality in divergent thinking tests: On the measurement precision of response propensity estimates

BACKGROUND

The originality of divergent thinking (DT) production is one of the most critical indicators of creative potential. It is commonly scored using the statistical infrequency of responses relative to all responses provided in a given sample.

AIMS

Response frequency estimates vary in terms of measurement precision. This issue has been widely overlooked and is addressed in the current study.

SAMPLE AND METHOD

Secondary data analysis of 202 participants was performed. A total of 900 uniquely identified responses were generated on three DT tasks and subjected to a 1-parameter logistic model with a response as the unit of measurement which allowed for the calculation of response-level conditional reliability (and marginal reliability as an overall summary of measurement precision).

RESULTS

Marginal reliability of response propensity estimates ranged from .62 to .67 across the DT tasks. Unique responses in the sample (the basis for the classic uniqueness scoring) displayed the lowest conditional reliability (across tasks: ≈ .50). Reliability increased nonlinearly as a function of both the frequency of occurrence predicted by the model (conditional reliability) and sample size (conditional and marginal reliability).

CONCLUSIONS

This study indicates that the common practice of frequency-based originality scoring with typical sample sizes (e.g., N = 100 to N = 200) yields unacceptable levels of measurement precision (i.e., in particular for highly original responses). We further offer recommendations to mitigate the lack of measurement precision of frequency-based originality scores for DT research.