Thin slices of creativity: using single-word utterances to assess creative cognition

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psychometrics

Background:

• Individual differences in creative cognition are complex.
• Assessing creativity often requires extensive testing batteries.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test if creative cognition is evident in brief, single-word responses.
• To determine if semantic distance in word associations can predict creativity.

Main Methods:

• 193 participants generated verb responses to nouns.
• Creative responses were cued for half the nouns.
• Latent semantic analysis (LSA) measured semantic distance between noun-verb pairs.

Main Results:

• Semantic distance was greater for cued (creative) responses.
• Higher semantic distance in cued responses correlated significantly with a creativity factor.
• This relationship held even after controlling for intelligence and personality.

Conclusions:

• Creative cognition can be reliably and validly assessed from minimal behavioral data.
• Brief verbal tasks offer a practical method for measuring individual differences in creativity.