Abstract
The Remote Associates Test (RAT, CRA) is a classic creativity test used to measure creativity as a function of associative ability. The RAT has been administered in various different languages. Nonetheless, because of how embedded in language the test is, only a few items are directly translatable, and most of the time, the RAT is created a new in each language. This process of manual (and in two cases, computational) creation of RAT items is guided by the researchers' understanding of the task. This paper focuses on the question of whether RAT datasets administered in different languages within the literature are comparable. To answer this question, datasets acquired using different RAT stimuli are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Kruskal-Wallis tests are conducted to find out whether there is a significant difference between any of the datasets for a given time frame. Pairwise Mann-Whitney post-hoc tests are then used to find out which pairs are different. Significant differences are observed between 18 dataset pairings regarding Accuracy and between 16 in terms of Response Time. The potential sources of these differences are discussed, together with what this means for creativity psychometrics and computational vs. manual creation of stimuli.
Highlights
The Remote Associates Test is a creativity test that is often used in the literature (Mednick and Mednick, 1971; Ansburg and Hill, 2003; Ward et al, 2008; Cai et al, 2009; Cunningham et al, 2009)
In order to find out whether differences between results for different languages exist at all, Kruskal-Wallis Tests were conducted for different timesteps and on two existing performance metrics: Accuracy and Response Time
Significant differences were observed between multiple languages and datasets on both the Accuracy and Response Time performance metrics
Summary
The Remote Associates Test is a creativity test that is often used in the literature (Mednick and Mednick, 1971; Ansburg and Hill, 2003; Ward et al, 2008; Cai et al, 2009; Cunningham et al, 2009). Because solving the RAT relies on knowing various expressions and compound words from a language, native speakers have an advantage and are generally the target population when deploying the RAT This gives rise to a need for different RAT stimulus sets in different languages. As only a few items are translatable, RAT sets of items are created anew in each language by researchers This means that RAT queries are probably impacted by the language itself and quite likely by the preferences and knowledge of compound words of the authors of the stimulus dataset. The Remote Associates Test (RAT) in the native language of the participants is administered in many creativity studies Results reported in these studies are, impacted by the quality and difficulty of RAT items in each language. The fifth and last section discusses the results and gives a view of possible future work
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