Creativity Research Journal

An important step in understanding domain-specific qualities of creativity is determining what patterns exist in self-perceived creativity across domains and how these patterns associate with other characteristics relevant to creativity. In two studies involving high school (Study 1) and undergraduate (Study 2) students, hierarchical cluster analyses revealed four clusters in self-perceived creativity: “I am creative,” “I am not creative,” “I might be creative in math/science,” and “I might be creative, but not in math/science.” In the first study, a discriminant function analysis indicated that the “I am creative” and “I might be creative, but not in math/science” clusters were associated with higher openness and extraversion. In the second study, the “I am creative” and “I might be creative, but not in math/science” clusters were similarly associated with higher openness, extraversion, creative self-efficacy, and self-esteem, whereas lower agreeableness and conscientiousness were associated with the “I am creative” and “I might be creative in math/science” clusters. These findings suggest that clusters of self-perceived creativity are described by both overall magnitude (low vs. high) and domain (math/science vs. other domains), and relative associations with different personal characteristics vary across these clusters.

Creativity has long been viewed as the bastion of human expression. With the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI), there is an emerging notion of artificial creativity that contests traditional perspectives of artistic exploration. This paper explores the complex dynamics of this evolution by examining how generative AI intertwines with and transforms the art world. It presents a comprehensive analysis of the challenges posed by generative AI in art, from questions of authenticity and intellectual property to ethical dilemmas and impacts on conventional art practices. Simultaneously, it investigates the revolutionary opportunities generative AI offers, including the democratization of art creation, the expansion of creative boundaries, and the development of new collaborative and economic models. The paper posits that the integration of generative AI in art is not just a technological advancement but a significant cultural shift, which necessitates a reevaluation of our understanding of art and the artist. It concludes with a forward-looking perspective, advocating for a collaborative approach to harness the potential of this technology in enriching human creativity and ensuring the vibrant evolution of the art world in the era of AI-driven generation.

As automation advances and markets transform, creative skills are becoming increasingly important. In the present study (N = 813), we therefore investigate how creative performance can be enhanced. Participants either participated in a fun recreational game, a fun-focused game, a math task, or none (control condition). This allowed us to analyze the impact of tasks that elicit positive emotions due to their fun nature and more stressful tasks, such as math, on later creative task performance. Contrary to our predictions, prior engagement in joyful or arithmetic tasks did not notably affect creativity, indicating a multifaceted relation among task categories, creativity metrics, and task-switching. Exploratory analyses revealed that fluency, but not originality and convergent thinking, was positively associated with creative self-efficacy and growth mind-set and negatively with fixed mind-set. The sequence in which divergent and convergent thinking tasks were presented affected originality but not fluency. In summary, our research underlines the intricacies of task categories, individual differences, and creative performance. Implications for creative enhancement methods across diverse contexts are discussed. ARTICLE HISTORY

This empirical investigation examined the cross-cultural usefulness of a measure of creative potential, namely the short form of the Runco Ideational Behavior Scale (RIBS). The RIBS has been used in several investigations and existing data show it to be a reliable criterion measure, usually with a two-factor structure. Scores from the RIBS correlated with tests of divergent thinking (DT); however, the RIBS is much easier to administer. Both DT and the RIBS focus on ideation. College students whose native language is Arabic (N= 383) completed the 25-item, short version of the RIBS. We tested the factor structure with exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and discriminant validity evidence with Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) and found a stronger support for the two-factor solution than the one-factor solution. Reliability evidence was also strong in the present sample. The first factor (“specific ideation”) had weak correlation with Raven’s SPM test whereas the second factor (“broad ideation”) was not significantly related. The results are discussed in terms of the relevant literature.

Tales of working through the night permeate biographical accounts of eminent creative figures. However, empirical research on the association between sleep deprivation and creativity is scarce and inconsistent. Some studies indicate that sleep deprivation impairs creative thinking, while others suggest that sleep deprivation enhances it. The present article provides a systematic review of literature reporting experiments assessing the impact of sleep deprivation on creative cognition. The literature search and screening followed the PRISMA Statement and used the PICOS framework to structure extraction of information from studies, while the NIH quality assessment tools were used to assess risk for flaws in study methods. From an initial pool of 521 studies, eight met inclusion criteria. These studies used diverse methods and measures; therefore, a qualitative review approach to data synthesis was adopted. Results revealed that sleep deprivation tends to impair creative thinking. However, the quality of studies was fair to poor, statistical power was low, and confidence intervals for effect sizes were wide, limiting what can be confidently inferred about the effect of sleep deprivation on creative thinking from the existing literature. This observation underscores the pressing need for additional research, for which this article offers methodological advice and research directions.

Despite decades of research, the creative process remains to be fully understood, and most theories and empirical evidence focus on adults’ creativity. Without understanding children’s creative processes, the generalizability of these theories is questionable, which is crucial for teaching, learning, and parenting. However, studying children’s creative processes is challenging because of their still-developing meta-cognition, which is an essential component of the creative process. In this study, we conducted interviews with middle childhood-aged students (n = 30) after they completed four different types of divergent thinking tasks, examining the creative process during and beyond idea generation. Using inductive thematic analysis, we identified four main themes with associated subthemes, with Memory (experiences, knowledge, references, and personal and social interests) and Cognitive Strategies (evaluative processes and hypothetical thinking) as the primary themes. These data offer insight into how the main themes Memory and Cognitive Strategies reflect associative and executive processes, respectively, and the interplay between these in children’s divergent thinking. Findings from this study revealed that children were able to explain their process of generating an idea in the vast majority of responses. Additionally, this work provides insight into improving creativity, methods of assessment, and our understanding of creativity development.

Metaphor is crucial in human cognition and creativity, facilitating abstract thinking, analogical reasoning, and idea generation. Typically, human raters manually score the originality of responses to creative thinking tasks – a laborious and error-prone process. Previous research sought to remedy these risks by scoring creativity tasks automatically using semantic distance and large language models (LLMs). Here, we extend research on automatic creativity scoring to metaphor generation – the ability to creatively describe episodes and concepts using nonliteral language. Metaphor is arguably more abstract and naturalistic than prior targets of automated creativity assessment. We collected 4,589 responses from 1,546 participants to various metaphor prompts and corresponding human creativity ratings. We fine-tuned two open-source LLMs (RoBERTa and GPT-2) – effectively “teaching” them to score metaphors like humans – before testing their ability to accurately assess the creativity of new metaphors. Results showed both models reliably predicted new human creativity ratings (RoBERTa r = .72, GPT-2 r = .70), significantly more strongly than semantic distance (r = .42). Importantly, the fine-tuned models generalized accurately to metaphor prompts they had not been trained on (RoBERTa r = .68, GPT-2 r = .63). We provide open access to the fine-tuned models, allowing researchers to assess metaphor creativity in a reproducible and timely manner.

This paper introduces a new dynamic theoretical framework for understanding the role of individual differences (IDs) as necessary mechanisms in the creative process: the Individual Differences HOListic (IDHOL) model. First, through a series of questions, some micro- and macro dynamics in which IDs participate as organizers of the creative process are explained. The IDHOL model essentially explains where and when IDs can influence the creative process by considering three layers of influence, each of them representing a possible level of analysis for the study of IDs in creativity research: the psycho-biological layer, the context layer, and the creative states layer. This model is intentionally used to show that individuals can only be considered central to the study of a creative process if they are viewed as holistic entities, and that their idiosyncratic influences in the process can only emerge because of the interactive dynamics with the various places (contexts) and moments (states) necessary to the process. Finally, based on the structure of the IDHOL model, some research guidelines are given for structuring the study of variation in creative dynamics by outlining selected experimental examples from the author’s work of how the study of IDs can be included in the creativity research agenda.

In this invited paper, I briefly review my past, current, and future lines of research. The associative theory of creativity argues that higher creative individuals have a richer semantic memory structure that facilitates broader associative search processes, that leads to the combination of remote concepts into novel and appropriate ideas. Based on this theory, in my research I investigate the role of knowledge-or semantic memory-in high-level cognition, focusing on creativity, associative thinking, and memory search, in typical and clinical populations. To do so, I apply computational tools from network science, natural language processing, and machine learning, coupled with empirical cognitive and neural research. Such computational tools are enabling the representation and operationalization of the structure of semantic memory and the processes that operate over it. This is critical as it allows us to start quantifying issues that for a very long time were studied very subjectively in creativity research-remoteness of ideas, associative thinking, flexible/ richer semantic memory structure, etc. Such work is offering unique, quantitative, ways to directly study classic theories of creativity, propelling forward our understanding of its complexity. ARTICLE HISTORY

Chance plays an acknowledged role in creativity, but taking it seriously challenges traditional notions of talent and expertise as well as the importance of agency and intentionality. Chance without skill is not enough on its own to support creativity. The phenomenon of serendipity requires both luck and the skill to make the most of it. This review argues that it can provide a lens through which to understand how individual, emotional and environmental factors interact in the creative process. However, serendipity is acknowledged to be a complex phenomenon that is not easily investigated from an empirical perspective. This review addresses some of the complexities, offers methodological recommendations and surveys some emerging findings.