For decades, researchers have struggled with measurement problems related to the construct validity of divergent and convergent thinking in creativity assessments. In response, some have called for battery-based approaches. Recently, digital games have emerged as a potential alternative, offering increased scalability and improved ecological validity. This article presents CREA: a new, scalable, game-based assessment suite. CREA includes crea.tiles and crea.blender, non-verbal games featuring both divergent and convergent thinking modes, as well as crea.ideas - the Alternative Uses Task, a standard test of divergent thinking, and crea.logic - a test of abstract reasoning. The novel convergent and divergent thinking game modes are constructed within the same contextual environment and with theoretically motivated differences in game-prompts to understand and generalize from the emerging elicited behaviors. In this study, 408 participants completed the CREA suite and selected validation measures, representing the largest game-based validation study to date. Both convergent and discriminant validity is demonstrated for crea.tiles with respect to standard tests, with correlations ranging from r = .1-.4. Having CREA freely accessible, we aim to broaden the accessibility of creativity assessment to researchers, educators, and the general public and through this scaleup validate the rich creative behavioral patterns observed in this study. Plain Language SummaryCreative thinking is an essential attribute for success in the 21st century, yet it is difficult to measure because it is complex and contextual. Traditional pen and paper tests of creative thinking are the status quo and are backed up by years of research; however, there are well-known issues with these tests such as (1) they are difficult to scale up, as they require expert human-raters to evaluate the responses; (2) many of them are verbal, which is not necessarily fair within a culturally and linguistically diverse population; and (3) there are still fundamental open questions about what they actually measure. Digital, game-based creativity assessments represent an emerging alternative to conventional creativity tests, presenting the potential for increasing scalability and improving the quality of the results. This article presents CREA: a new, scalable, suite of game-based assessments. CREA includes crea.tiles and crea.blender - non-verbal games featuring several game modes, as well as crea.ideas - a standard test of divergent thinking, and crea.logic - a test of abstract reasoning. Participants (n=408) were university students from North America. They completed the CREA suite and a series of validation measures. The results from the study indicate that the current, freely accessible, version of the CREA suite demonstrated sufficient validity to be used by researchers and practitioners as a scalable, creativity assessment instrument for automated figural assessment of divergent and convergent thinking.

Existing research has consistently supported a relationship between creative achievement and specific personality traits (e.g. openness to experience). However, such work has largely focused on univariate associations, potentially obscuring complex interactions among multiple personality factors, rendering an incomplete picture of the creative personality. We applied a psychometric network approach to characterize the multidimensional personality structure of highly creative individuals in the arts (artists) and sciences (scientists), using data from three samples (N = 4,015): college students, a representative adult sample, and the Big-C project of eminent creative professionals. Replicating past work, we found that artists showed reliably higher levels of openness to experience compared to scientists and a control group of less creative people. Psychometric network analysis revealed that artists were characterized by higher connectivity (i.e. co-occurrence) with other personality traits for openness, indicating that openness may be more heterogeneous in how it co-occurs with other personality traits in highly creative people. Across all three samples, we found that the scientists' personality network structure was more cohesive than the personality network of artists and the control group, indicating greater homogeneity in the personality characteristics of scientists. Our findings uncover a constellation of traits that give rise to creative achievement in the arts and sciences.

Scoring divergent thinking tasks opens multiple avenues and possibilities-decisions researchers have to make. While some scholars postulate that scoring should focus on the best ideas provided, the measurement of the best responses (e.g., top scoring) comes along with challenges. More specifically, compared to the average quality across all responses, top scoring uses less information-the bad ideas are thrown away-which decreases reliability. To resolve this issue, this article introduces a multidimensional top-scoring approach analogous to linear growth modeling which retains information provided by all responses (best ideas and bad ideas). Across two studies, using both subjective human ratings and semantic distance originality scoring of responses to over a dozen divergent thinking tasks, we demonstrated that Maximum (the best idea) and Top2 Scoring (two best ideas) could surpass typically applied average scoring in measurement precision when the bad ideas' originality is used as auxiliary information (i.e., additional information in the analysis). We thus recommend retaining all ideas when scoring divergent thinking tasks, and we discuss the potential this new approach holds for creativity research and practice.

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been shown to enhance divergent and convergent creative thinking. Yet, how stimulation impacts creative performance over time, and what cognitive mechanisms underlie any such enhancement, remain largely unanswered questions. In the present research, we aimed to (1) verify the impact of DLPFC tDCS on both convergent and divergent thinking, and further investigated (2) the temporal dynamics of divergent thinking, focusing on the serial order effect (i.e., the tendency for ideas to become more original and less frequent over time), and (3) any role that cognitive inhibition may play in mediating any effect of stimulation on creative thinking (considering the DLPFC's involvement in driving inhibitory processes that are also relevant for creative thinking). In a within-subjects design, twenty-six participants received three types of cross-hemispheric tDCS stimulation over the DLPFC (left cathodal and right anodal, L-R+; left anodal and right cathodal, L+R-; and sham). Before stimulation, they completed a pre-flanker task measuring cognitive inhibition; during stimulation, they completed the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), Remote Associates Test (RAT), and post-flanker task. Results showed that, compared with the sham stimulation, originality of responses in the AUT was significantly enhanced in the L+R- condition, while no tDCS effect was observed for the RAT. Additionally, compared with the other stimulation conditions, we found a diminished serial order effect in the L+R- condition characterized by an accelerated production of more original ideas. Critically, the L+R- condition was accompanied by better performance on the flanker task. Our findings thus verify that L+R- tDCS over the DLPFC accelerates idea originality also providing tentative clues that inhibition may act as a cognitive mechanism underlying enhancements in divergent thinking resulting from frontal lobe neuromodulation.

Creativity often requires envisioning novel connections and combinations among elements in space, e.g., to invent a new product or generate a work of art. A relationship between spatial cognition and creativity has been demonstrated at both the behavioral and neural levels, but the exact neurocognitive mechanisms that bridge this connection remain unclear. The present study tested whether individual differences in functional activation in spatial cognition-implicated brain regions (specifically focusing on premotor and superior parietal cortex) during mental rotation were associated with figural creativity in a composite object creation task. Functional activation in premotor and superior parietal cortex during a classical spatial task (mental rotation; MRT) has previously been causally linked with dissociable components of spatial cognition: superior parietal activity with abstract spatial representation, and premotor activity with active spatial manipulation. The present findings indicate that individual differences in functional activation of both superior parietal cortex and premotor cortex during MRT were associated with individual differences in figural creativity. The present data thus provide new evidence of a correlation between the activity in spatial cognition-implicated brain regions and figural creativity, and suggest initial insights into particular components of spatial processing (both representation and manipulation) that may be related to creative ability.

Creativity research often relies on human raters to judge the novelty of participants’ responses on open-ended tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Albeit useful, manual ratings are subjective and labor intensive. To address these limitations, researchers increasingly use automatic scoring methods based on a natural language processing technique for quantifying the semantic distance between words. However, many methodological choices remain open on how to obtain semantic distance scores for ideas, which can significantly impact reliability and validity. In this project, we propose a new semantic distance-based method, maximum associative distance (MAD), for assessing response novelty in AUT. Within a response, MAD uses the semantic distance of the word that is maximally remote from the prompt word to reflect response novelty. We compare the results from MAD with other competing semantic distance-based methods, including element-wise-multiplication—a commonly used compositional model—across three published datasets including a total of 447 participants. We found MAD to be more strongly correlated with human creativity ratings than the competing methods. In addition, MAD scores reliably predict external measures such as openness to experience. We further explored how idea elaboration affects the performance of various scoring methods and found that MAD is closely aligned with human raters in processing multi-word responses. The MAD method thus improves the psychometrics of semantic distance for automatic creativity assessment, and it provides clues about what human raters find creative about ideas.

Creative thinking is important for success in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Yet creativity in STEM is perhaps the most under-researched question in the creativity literature, with little known about the neurocognitive mechanisms supporting scientific creative thinking abilities, such as hypothesis generation. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, undergraduate STEM majors (n = 47) completed a scientific hypothesis generation task (thinking of novel/plausible explanations for hypothetical scenarios) and a control task (thinking of synonyms to replace a word in a hypothetical scenario). Multivariate pattern analysis identified a whole-brain network supporting hypothesis generation, including hubs of the default (posterior cingulate cortex [PCC]), salience (right anterior insula [AI]), and semantic control (left inferior frontal gyrus [IFG]) networks. Using these network hubs as seed regions, we found increased between-network functional connectivity during hypothesis generation, including stronger coupling between semantic control (IFG) and posterior default regions (PCC and bilateral angular gyrus) and stronger coupling between salience (AI) and default regions, alongside weaker within-network functional connectivity. Our results indicate that scientific creative thinking involves increased cooperation among the default, salience, and control networks-similar to creative thinking in other domains-potentially reflecting a coordination of spontaneous/generative and controlled/evaluative processes to construct original explanations for scientific phenomena.

Creativity research commonly involves recruiting human raters to judge the originality of responses to divergent thinking tasks, such as the alternate uses task (AUT). These manual scoring practices have benefited the field, but they also have limitations, including labor-intensiveness and subjectivity, which can adversely impact the reliability and validity of assessments. To address these challenges, researchers are increasingly employing automatic scoring approaches, such as distributional models of semantic distance. However, semantic distance has primarily been studied in English-speaking samples, with very little research in the many other languages of the world. In a multilab study (N= 6,522 participants), we aimed to validate semantic distance on the AUT in 12 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. We gathered AUT responses and human creativity ratings (N= 107,672 responses), as well as criterion measures for validation (e.g., creative achievement).We compared two deep learning-based semantic models—multilingual bidirectional encoder representations from transformers and cross-lingual language model RoBERTa—to compute semantic distance and validate this automated metric with human ratings and criterion measures. We found that the top-performing model for each language correlated positively with human creativity ratings, with correlations ranging from medium to large across languages. Regarding criterion validity, semantic distance showed small-to-moderate effect sizes (comparable to human ratings) for openness, creative behavior/achievement, and creative self-concept. We provide open access to our multilingual dataset for future algorithmic development, along with Python code to compute semantic distance in 12 languages. © 2023 American Psychological Association

Creativity has long been thought to involve associative processes in memory: connecting concepts to form ideas, inventions, and artworks. However, associa-tive thinking has been difficult to study due to limitations in modeling memory structure and retrieval processes. Recent advances in computational models of semantic memory allow researchers to examine how people navigate a se-mantic space of concepts when forming associations, revealing key search strat-egies associated with creativity. Here, we synthesize cognitive, computational, and neuroscience research on creativity and associative thinking. This Review highlights distinctions between free-and goal-directed association, illustrates the role of associative thinking in the arts, and links associative thinking to brain systems supporting both semantic and episodic memory - offering a new perspective on a longstanding creativity theory.

Dual process theories of creativity suggest that creative thought is supported by both a generation phase, where unconstrained ideas are generated and combined in novel ways, and an evaluation phase, where those ideas are filtered for usefulness in context. Neurocognitively, both the default mode network (DMN) and the executive control network (ECN) have been implicated in generation and evaluation, respectively. Importantly, generating and evaluating ideas implies that the same information, reflected in patterns of neural activity, must be present in both phases, suggesting that information should be 'reinstated' (i.e. multidimensional patterns must reappear) within and/or between network nodes. In the present study, we used representational similarity analysis (RSA) to investigate the extent to which nodes of the DMN and ECN reinstate information between a generation phase, in which participants generated novel or appropriate word associations to single nouns, and an evaluation phase, where we presented the associations back to participants to evaluate them. We showed strong evidence for reinstatement within the ECN dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex during the novel association task, and within the DMN medial prefrontal cortex during the appropriate association task. We additionally showed between network reinstatement between the ECN dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and the DMN posterior parietal cortex during the novelty task. These results demonstrate the importance of both within- and between-informational reinstatement for generating and evaluating ideas, and implicate both the DMN and ECN in dual process models of creativity.