The Road Not Taken

To investigate individual differences in creativity as measured with a complex problem-solving task, we developed a computational model of the remote associates test (RAT). For 50 years, the RAT has been used to measure creativity. Each RAT question presents three cue words that are linked by a fourth word, which is the correct answer. We hypothesized that individuals perform poorly on the RAT when they are biased to consider high-frequency candidate answers. To assess this hypothesis, we tested individuals with 48 RAT questions and required speeded responding to encourage guessing. Results supported our hypothesis. We generated a norm-based model of the RAT using a high-dimensional semantic space, and this model accurately identified correct answers. A frequency-biased model that included different levels of bias for high-frequency candidate answers explained variance for both correct and incorrect responses. Providing new insight into the nature of creativity, the model explains why some RAT questions are more difficult than others, and why some people perform better than others on the RAT.

[1]  S. Mednick.  The associative basis of the creative process. , 1962, Psychological review.

[2]  H. Kucera,et al.  Computational analysis of present-day American English , 1967 .

[3]  F. M. Andrews,et al.  Creative Thinking and Level of Intelligence , 1967 .

[4]  R. G. Evans,et al.  The Remote Associates Test as a Predictor of Productivity in Brainstorming Groups , 1981 .

[5]  A. Isen,et al.  Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving. , 1987, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[6]  G. Regehr,et al.  Intuition in the context of discovery , 1990, Cognitive Psychology.

[7]  T. Landauer,et al.  A Solution to Plato's Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and Representation of Knowledge. , 1997 .

[8]  E. Fodor.  Subclinical inclination toward manic-depression and creative performance on the Remote Associates Test , 1999 .

[9]  H Pashler,et al.  How persuasive is a good fit? A comment on theory testing. , 2000, Psychological review.

[10]  Mark Jung-Beeman,et al.  Normative data for 144 compound remote associate problems , 2003, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[11]  Thomas A. Schreiber,et al.  The University of South Florida free association, rhyme, and word fragment norms , 2004, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[12]  S. Sitton,et al.  Synesthesia, Creativity and Puns , 2004, Psychological reports.

[13]  Richard M. Shiffrin,et al.  Word Association Spaces for Predicting Semantic Similarity Effects in Episodic Memory. , 2005 .

[14]  A. Healy.  Experimental cognitive psychology and its applications , 2005 .

[15]  S. Harkins.  Mere effort as the mediator of the evaluation-performance relationship. , 2006, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[16]  A. Galinsky,et al.  Thinking within the box: The relational processing style elicited by counterfactual mind-sets. , 2006, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[17]  T. Griffiths,et al.  Google and the Mind , 2007, Psychological science.

[18]  H. Pashler,et al.  Incubation benefits only after people have been misdirected , 2007, Memory & cognition.

[19]  Sascha Topolinski,et al.  Where there's a will-there's no intuition. The unintentional basis of semantic coherence judgments , 2008 .

[20]  J. Ward,et al.  Synaesthesia, creativity and art: what is the link? , 2008, British journal of psychology.

[21]  D. Cai,et al.  REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks , 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[22]  Sascha Topolinski,et al.  Scanning the “Fringe” of consciousness: What is felt and what is not felt in intuitions about semantic coherence , 2009, Consciousness and Cognition.

[23]  Rolf Reber,et al.  Gaining Insight Into the “Aha” Experience , 2010 .