Stable and Dynamic Properties of Category Structure Guide Imaginative Thought

Abstract

Previous research has shown that category exemplars vary in how accessible they are within their categories, and that more accessible exemplars are more likely than less accessible ones to be used as starting points in creative idea generation. In the present study, specific exemplars of fruit and tools that varied in their baseline levels of unprimed accessibility were made more accessible by way of an initial rating task, which led to an increased likelihood of those primed exemplars being used in a subsequent creative generation task. At the same time, items with higher baseline levels of unprimed accessibility continued to be used more often than items with lower unprimed accessibility, providing evidence that long-term associative strengths and recent experiences with exemplars both play a role in creative generation. Explicit recall of primed items did not correlate with their use in imagination, consistent with the idea that reliance on recent experiences in generating novel ideas may be inadvertent rather than deliberate.