Metacognitive Prediction of Creative Performance in Divergent Thinking

Understanding how individuals monitor and predict their own creative performance is essential for advancing theories of creative metacognition. Despite extensive research on metacognitive predictions in memory and problem solving, little is known about whether people can accurately anticipate their performance in divergent thinking tasks. The present study examined prospective metacognitive prediction accuracy in the Alternative Uses Task (AUT), focusing on fluency, flexibility, and originality. Thirty-two participants first ranked 10 everyday objects according to how well they believed they would perform on each AUT item and subsequently completed a verbal AUT for the same objects. Creative performance was independently scored by trained raters, and prediction accuracy was quantified using Gamma correlations between predicted and actual performance rankings. Results showed above-chance prediction accuracy for fluency and flexibility, but not for originality. These findings suggest that individuals can prospectively monitor aspects of divergent thinking supported by semantic accessibility and category-based search, but may have difficulty anticipating originality, which may depend more strongly on remote association and representational transformation. The study contributes to research on creative metacognition by showing that metacognitive prediction accuracy in divergent thinking is dimension-specific rather than uniformly accurate or inaccurate.