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Comparing the Frequency Effect Between the Lexical Decision and Naming Tasks in Chinese
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Naming unrelated words predicts creativity.

Jay A Olson1, Johnny Nahas2, Denis Chmoulevitch2

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|June 18, 2021
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Researchers developed the Divergent Association Task to measure divergent thinking. This task involves participants naming unrelated words, with greater semantic distance indicating higher creativity and objective divergent thinking ability.

Keywords:
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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Psychometrics

Background:

  • Creative individuals often generate more divergent ideas.
  • Objective measures of divergent thinking are needed to complement traditional creativity assessments.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To test if semantic distance between unrelated words can objectively measure divergent thinking.
  • To validate the Divergent Association Task (DAT) as a creativity assessment tool.

Main Methods:

  • 8,914 participants were asked to name 10 maximally dissimilar words.
  • A computational algorithm calculated the average semantic distance between named words.
  • Correlations were assessed between semantic distance and established creativity measures.

Main Results:

  • Moderate to strong correlations were found between semantic distance and creativity measures (Alternative Uses Task, Bridge-the-Associative-Gap Task).
  • Semantic distance showed minimal variation across demographic groups in a global study.
  • Higher semantic distances positively correlated with performance on creativity-predictive tasks.

Conclusions:

  • The Divergent Association Task provides a brief, reliable, and objective measure of divergent thinking.
  • Semantic distance is a valid indicator of creativity, correlating as strongly as traditional measures with each other.