Verbal Creativity Tasks Research Articles

To Nap or to Rest? The Influence of a Sixty-Minute Intervention on Verbal and Figural Convergent and Divergent Thinking

Background: The relationship between sleep and creativity is a topic of much controversy. General benefits of napping have been described not only in sleep-deprived individuals and in shift workers, but also in people with sufficient night sleep. However, only few studies have investigated the relationship between nap and creativity. Methods: Forty-two native German speakers (29 females, mean age = 24 years, SD = 3.3 years) took part in two experimental sessions (i.e., baseline and intervention). In both sessions, divergent and convergent verbal and figural creativity tasks were administered at the same time of the day. While the baseline session was identical for all the participants, in the second session participants were randomized into either a sixty-minute nap or a sixty-minute rest group. Results: No significant group differences were found for neither divergent nor convergent creativity thinking tasks, suggesting that the interventions had similar effects in both groups. Interestingly, the analysis of the pooled data (i.e., pooled nap and rest groups) indicated differential effects of figural versus verbal creativity tasks, such that significant post-intervention improvements were found for the figural, but not for the verbal divergent and convergent thinking tasks. Conclusions: While further studies are needed to confirm these findings, to the best of our knowledge, such a dissociation between performance of verbal and figural creativity tasks after nap/rest interventions has not been described to date.

Impact of Competitive Conditions on Amplitudes of Event-Related Potentials during Verbal Creative and Noncreative Task Performance

Impact of Competitive Conditions on Amplitudes of Event-Related Potentials during Verbal Creative and Noncreative Task Performance

Hyperzographia in Neglect Exposing a Spatial Dissociation between Painting and Writing—A Case Study

The paper depicts and describes the observation of a remarkable post-stroke production of paintings made by a 54-year-old, right-handed man who suffered an acute right hemispheric stroke. The patient’s post-stroke productivity and the spatial distribution of text and drawings were assessed by means of structural analysis of the paintings, as well as neuropsychological and creativity testing. Compared to the age-matched healthy control group, the patient did not only produce more valid answers in the verbal creativity task, but he also drew more images in the figural creativity task. Most strikingly, the painted images were located on the right side in 70% of the paintings, while the text was aligned to the left side in 42% of the paintings. This dissociation between writing and painting behavior was further mirrored in the patient’s neuropsychological performance in a reading test and in a design fluency task. This observation of an increased post-stroke production of paintings may coin a new term, i.e., “hyperzographia”, in analogy to hypergraphia. Additionally, the puzzling dissociation of the writing and painting behavior highlights an important new clinical aspect concerning a differential influence of hemispatial neglect on writing and painting.

Orientation Toward Intrinsic Motivation Mediates the Relationship Between Metacognition and Creativity

ABSTRACTMetacognition and motivation are considered key facets of self‐regulation in various contexts. Recent studies identified a link between metacognition and creative performance, with metacognitively aware students performing more creatively and exhibiting higher levels of intrinsic and identified extrinsic motivation. The present study aims to examine the relationship between metacognition, orientation toward intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, and creative performance. One hundred nineteen university students completed the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) and Scale of Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Orientation in the Classroom and performed four verbal creativity tasks (product improvement task, consequences task, and two unusual uses tasks). The partial correlation network showed that all the creativity tasks were uniquely related to at least one facet of metacognition, and that the most complex task (product improvement task) was linked to both metacognitive knowledge and regulation. Furthermore, the structural equation model indicated that orientation toward intrinsic motivation mediated the relationship between metacognition and creative performance, explaining 16% of the variance in creative performance.

Metacognitively aware university students exhibit higher creativity and motivation to learn

The relationship between metacognition and intrinsic motivation and the relationship between intrinsic motivation and creativity are well established in the current research. However, little is known about the role of metacognition in extrinsic motivation and the results of correlational analyses between metacognition and creative outcomes are often contradictory. The aim of the present study was to explore the differences in learning motivation and creativity between students with different levels of metacognitive awareness. Three hundred and eighty-one university students completed the metacognitive awareness inventory (MAI) and academic motivation scale (AMS-C28), and performed four verbal creativity tasks (product improvement task, consequences task, unusual uses, and similarities test). A non-hierarchical cluster analysis identified two specific groups of participants based on their metacognitive awareness; students with higher levels (40,4% of participants) and lower levels (59,6% of participants) of reported metacognitive awareness. Students with higher levels of metacognitive awareness were more intrinsically and extrinsically motivated to learn and exhibited less amotivation (with a large effect size, ηp2 = 0.21). Moreover, the metacognitively aware students achieved higher overall scores in creative thinking tasks (with a small effect size, ηp2 = 0.03). The subsequent analyses of the individual creativity tasks identified significant differences in the product improvement task and similarities test, but not the consequences and unusual uses tasks.

Enhancing creativity by altering the frontoparietal control network functioning using transcranial direct current stimulation

The left angular gyrus (AG), part of the frontotemporal network, is implicated in creative thinking, including verbal creativity tasks such as novel metaphor generation. The current study tested the effects of tDCS over the left AG on two metaphor generation tasks. The study was a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, crossover study of anodal vs. cathodal stimulation by tDCS. Compared to sham, cathodal stimulation resulted in significantly increased novel metaphor generation, while anodal stimulation increased conventional metaphor generation. Higher motivation (behavioral approach system's "fun-seeking") was associated with greater metaphor creativity in the sham condition, and lower fun seeking was associated with producing a greater quantity of conventional metaphors. Following active stimulation, motivation traits no longer contributed to creative metaphor generation. Thus, the beneficial effect of cathodal tDCS over the left AG in generation of novel metaphors is through restraining the control network. The current study gives a glimpse into the neural basis for creative thinking.

Exploring the Effects of Age, Gender, and School Setting on Children’s Creative Thinking Skills

AbstractThe current study aimed to investigate whether age, gender, and testing environment may have an effect on children’s creativity in a real‐life setting. Participants included 111 children aged from seven to eleven years. They were given one verbal (Guilford’s Alternative Uses Task) and one figural (Test for Creative Thinking–Drawing Production) creative thinking task either in their everyday classroom or in their school “art room.” On average, in the verbal task, girls tended to outperform boys in fluency and flexibility. Contrary to the 4th‐grade slump found in previous studies, divergent thinking, on average, increased with age for verbal originality and verbal elaboration. These results suggest the potential importance of experience on verbal creativity tasks. In the verbal task, for the originality score, and in the drawing task, participants in the art room displayed, on average, greater levels of creative thinking than those in the classroom. These findings suggest that the physical environment can affect differently children’s creative potential.

Resting-State Fluctuations Underlie Free and Creative Verbal Behaviors in the Human Brain.

Resting-state fluctuations are ubiquitous and widely studied phenomena of the human brain, yet we are largely in the dark regarding their function in human cognition. Here we examined the hypothesis that resting-state fluctuations underlie the generation of free and creative human behaviors. In our experiment, participants were asked to perform three voluntary verbal tasks: a verbal fluency task, a verbal creativity task, and a divergent thinking task, during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. Blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD)-activity during these tasks was contrasted with a control- deterministic verbal task, in which the behavior was fully determined by external stimuli. Our results reveal that all voluntary verbal-generation responses displayed a gradual anticipatory buildup that preceded the deterministic control-related responses. Critically, the time-frequency dynamics of these anticipatory buildups were significantly correlated with resting-state fluctuations' dynamics. These correlations were not a general BOLD-related or verbal-response related result, as they were not found during the externally determined verbal control condition. Furthermore, they were located in brain regions known to be involved in language production, specifically the left inferior frontal gyrus. These results suggest a common function of resting-state fluctuations as the neural mechanism underlying the generation of free and creative behaviors in the human cortex.

Automating creativity assessment with SemDis: An open platform for computing semantic distance

Creativity research requires assessing the quality of ideas and products. In practice, conducting creativity research often involves asking several human raters to judge participants’ responses to creativity tasks, such as judging the novelty of ideas from the alternate uses task (AUT). Although such subjective scoring methods have proved useful, they have two inherent limitations—labor cost (raters typically code thousands of responses) and subjectivity (raters vary on their perceptions and preferences)—raising classic psychometric threats to reliability and validity. We sought to address the limitations of subjective scoring by capitalizing on recent developments in automated scoring of verbal creativity via semantic distance, a computational method that uses natural language processing to quantify the semantic relatedness of texts. In five studies, we compare the top performing semantic models (e.g., GloVe, continuous bag of words) previously shown to have the highest correspondence to human relatedness judgements. We assessed these semantic models in relation to human creativity ratings from a canonical verbal creativity task (AUT; Studies 1–3) and novelty/creativity ratings from two word association tasks (Studies 4–5). We find that a latent semantic distance factor—comprised of the common variance from five semantic models—reliably and strongly predicts human creativity and novelty ratings across a range of creativity tasks. We also replicate an established experimental effect in the creativity literature (i.e., the serial order effect) and show that semantic distance correlates with other creativity measures, demonstrating convergent validity. We provide an open platform to efficiently compute semantic distance, including tutorials and documentation (https://osf.io/gz4fc/).

The effects of light illuminance and correlated color temperature on mood and creativity

The lighting environment is one of the indoor environmental factors that may influence creativity. The combined effects of illumination (300 lx vs. 2000 lx) and color temperature (3000 K vs. 6000 K) on mood and creativity were investigated in 24 participants. During exposure, participants completed questionnaires to assess their mood and lighting perceptions, performed creative and analytical tasks, and collected saliva samples for analysis of melatonin concentration. An interactive effect of illuminance and color temperature on the mood was observed. The participants performed better on the performance of Flexibility, Fluency and Originality in the verbal creative task when they expressed higher positive mood (at 2000 lx, 6000 K and 300 lx, 3000 K) and performed better on the performance of Resistance to closure in the figural creative task when they reported the lowest positive mood (at 2000 lx, 3000 K). Analytical thinking, including calculation and echoic memory skills, was facilitated at the lighting setting (300 lx, 6000 K) that induced the least affective intensity. No significant difference in melatonin concentration was observed. This evidence implies that the affective state of the occupants was influenced by light and that their creative performance was altered accordingly. These findings will help to elaborate a design guideline on the lighting environment according to the specific needs of different tasks.

EEG "Signs" of Verbal Creative Task Fulfillment with and without Overcoming Self-Induced Stereotypes.

The study aimed to reveal task-related differences in story creation with and without the mental effort of overcoming self-induced stereotypes. Eighteen right-handed subjects (19.3 ± 1.1 years old) created stories. The subjects reported the formation of story plot stereotypes (as we call them: self-induced) during self-regulated creative production, which had to be overcome with the instruction to continue the story. Creative task fulfillment (without formed stereotypes—first stage of creation) was characterized by a decrease in the wave percentages of 9–10 Hz, 10–11 Hz and 11–12 Hz frequencies and EEG desynchronization (decreases in EEG spectral power) in the theta (4–8 Hz), alpha1 (8–10 Hz) and alpha2 (10–13 Hz) frequency bands in comparison with the REST (random episodic silent thought) state. The effortful creation task (with overcoming of self-induced stereotypes-second stage of creation) was characterized by increases in waves with frequencies of 9–10 Hz, 10–11 Hz, 11–12 Hz in temporal, occipital areas and pronounced EEG synchronization in alpha1,2 frequency bands in comparison with the free creation condition. It was also found, that the participants with the higher originality scores in psychological tests demonstrated increased percentage of high frequencies (11–12 Hz in comparison with those who had lower originality scores. Obtained results support the role of alpha and theta frequency bands dynamics in creative cognition.

The Relationships Between Cognitive Reserve and Creativity. A Study on American Aging Population.

The Cognitive Reserve (CR) hypothesis suggests that the brain actively attempts to cope with neural damages by using pre-existing cognitive processing approaches or by enlisting compensatory approaches. This would allow an individual with high CR to better cope with aging than an individual with lower CR. Many of the proxies used to assess CR indirectly refer to the flexibility of thought. The present paper aims at directly exploring the relationships between CR and creativity, a skill that includes flexible thinking. We tested a sample of 72 adults (aged between 45 and 78) assessing both their level of CR and their creativity. To evaluate CR we used the proxies commonly used in literature, namely, three subtests from the WAIS (vocabulary, similarities, and digit span) and the years of education. We also used an ad-hoc test asking people to report how frequently they tend to perform activities that are believed to increase CR. We used verbal creativity tasks (alternative uses and generation of acronyms) to assess individual levels of creativity. We asked participants to describe their main occupation (present or past) and coded each occupation as creative or not creative. Results (controlling for age-related differences) showed that scores from the WAIS correlated positively with creativity performance, even though correlations varied across the subtests. Focusing on the frequency and type of activities that people perform, and comparing individuals who have or had a creative job to those with a routine job, a clear relationship between creativity and CR emerged. This effect was more relevant than the level of job complexity. Implications for the study of CR and aging are discussed.

Effects of alpha and gamma transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) on verbal creativity and intelligence test performance

Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation method that allows to directly modulate brain oscillations of a given frequency. Using this method, it was recently shown that increasing alpha (10Hz) oscillations improved creative ideation with figural material and that increasing gamma (40Hz) oscillations speeded up performance in a figural matrices intelligence task. The aim of the present study was to examine whether these findings generalize to verbal creativity and intelligence tasks. In addition, we explored whether the stimulation effects are moderated by individual differences in creative potential and intelligence. Twenty-two adults received 10Hz, 40Hz and sham tACS while they worked on a verbal creativity (alternate uses) task and a verbal intelligence (anagram) task. Analyses revealed that 10Hz stimulation had a marginally significant effect on ideational fluency in the alternate uses task, whereas originality was unaffected. The beneficial effect of stimulation on fluency tended to emerge mainly in the individuals with higher creative potential. In the verbal intelligence task, in contrast, 40Hz stimulation did neither impact on performance nor interacted with individual differences in intelligence. These findings provide first tentative evidence that enhancing alpha oscillations through tACS may improve creative thinking not only in the figural but also in the verbal domain. The previously reported beneficial effect of gamma tACS on figural intelligence, however, could not be observed in a verbal task. In sum, the present study further corroborates the causal link between alpha oscillations and creative thinking and suggests that tACS may be a promising tool to enhance cognitive processes.

Creative ways to well-being: Reappraisal inventiveness in the context of anger-evoking situations

Neuroscientific studies in the field of creativity mainly focused on tasks drawing on basic verbal divergent thinking demands. This study took a step further by investigating brain mechanisms in response to other types of creative behavior, involving more “real-life” creativity demands in the context of emotion regulation and well-being. Specifically, functional patterns of EEG alpha activity were investigated while participants were required to generate as many and as different ways as possible to reappraise presented anger-eliciting situations in a manner that reduces their anger. Cognitive reappraisal involves some of the same cognitive processes as in conventional verbal creativity tasks, inasmuch as it requires an individual to inhibit or disengage from an emotional event, to shift attention between different perspectives, and to flexibly adopt new solutions. To examine whether alpha oscillations during cognitive reappraisal are different from those during conventional creative ideation, the EEG was also assessed during performance of the Alternative Uses task, requiring individuals to generate as many and as original uses of an object as possible. While cognitive reappraisal was associated with a similar pattern of alpha power as observed in conventional verbal creative ideation, the former yielded significantly stronger alpha power increases at prefrontal sites, along with lower alpha increases at more posterior cortical sites, indicating higher cognitive control and less spontaneous imaginative thought processes in the generation of effective strategies to regulate an ongoing negative emotional state.

Sleep Strengthens but does Not Reorganize Memory Traces in a Verbal Creativity Task.

Sleep after learning promotes the quantitative strengthening of new memories. Less is known about the impact of sleep on the qualitative reorganization of memory content. This study tested the hypothesis that sleep facilitates both memory strengthening and reorganization as indexed by a verbal creativity task. Sixty healthy university students (30 female, 30 male, 20-30 years) were investigated in a randomized, controlled parallel-group study with three experimental groups (sleep, sleep deprivation, daytime wakefulness). At baseline, 60 items of the Compound Remote Associate (CRA) task were presented. At retest after the experimental conditions, the same items were presented again together with 20 new control items to disentangle off-line incubation from online performance effects. Sleep significantly strengthened formerly encoded memories in comparison to both wake conditions (improvement in speed of correctly resolved items). Offline reorganization was not enhanced following sleep, but was enhanced following sleep-deprivation in comparison to sleep and daytime wakefulness (solution time of previously incubated, newly solved items). Online performance did not differ between the groups (solution time of new control items). The results support the notion that sleep promotes the strengthening, but not the reorganization, of newly encoded memory traces in a verbal creativity task. Future studies are needed to further determine the impact of sleep on different types of memory reorganization, such as associative thinking, creativity and emotional memory processing, and potential clinical translations, such as the augmentation of psychotherapy through sleep interventions.

Creative Expression and Its Evaluation on Work‐Related Verbal Tasks: A Comparison of Chinese and German Samples

AbstractTwo studies comparing Chinese and German samples by using work‐related verbal creativity tasks examined the role of culture in creative expression thereby also exploring culture's potential influence on creativity judgements. In Study 1, German participants (N = 60) scored higher than Chinese respondents (N = 60) in a work‐related unusual uses test on all objective creativity measures. Study 2 (Chinese: N = 59, German: N = 52) replicated these findings by applying an occupational creative problem‐solving task evaluated by using the Consensual Assessment Technique with judges from China as well as Germany. We observed high consensus among judges of each country as well as between the two cultures. Both German and Chinese judges rated the German respondents’ outcomes higher on most creativity dimensions (e.g., originality). Overall, German judges provided lower ratings. Our research extends previous intercultural findings solely based on art‐based creative performance to the occupational domain and indicates that higher creativity ascriptions toward the performance of Western people cannot be explained by assessments from Western raters.

A Cross-Cultural Study of Task Specificity in Creativity

This study provides new evidence concerning task specificity in creativity—examining through a cross-cultural perspective the extent to which performance in graphic versus verbal creativity tasks (domain specificity) and in divergent versus convergent creativity tasks (process specificity) are correlated. The relations between different creativity tasks in monocultural and multicultural samples of Chinese and French children were compared. Electronic versions of the Wallach and Kogan Creativity Test (WKCT, Wallach & Kogan, 1965; Lau & Cheung, 2010) and the Evaluation of Potential Creativity (EPoC; Lubart, Besancon, & Barbot, 2011; Barbot, Besancon, & Lubart, 2011) were used. Both measures showed satisfactory psychometric properties and cross-cultural structural validity. The results showed that culture has an impact on the structure of creative ability: It appeared that correlation patterns were different across Chinese and French groups and across monocultural and multicultural groups. Such results show that it is crucial to take task specificity into account when investigating the effect of culture on creativity. Indeed, our study implies that cultural differences that are found using one specific creativity task might not be automatically generalizable to all sorts of creativity tasks. Limitations are discussed and perspectives for future research on culture and task specificity in creativity are proposed.

Facilitating creative thinking in the classroom: Investigating the effects of plants and the colour green on visual and verbal creativity

We report upon a study concerned with the effect of exposure to live plants, views to nature and the colour green upon visual and verbal creativity. The study reported in this paper was undertaken with 108 business students at a British University who were randomly allocated to one of the three conditions. The control group were placed in a classroom with no plants present and blinds drawn to block view to natural settings, the first experimental group were placed in a classroom with no plants present, blinds drawn to block views to nature but completed the creativity tasks on green paper. The second experimental group were placed in the same room as the other groups, but were surrounded by live plants and had views to nature through the large classroom windows. All participants completed two creativity tasks; a visual creativity task and a verbal creativity task. Visual creativity was assessed using a modified version of Amabile's Consensual Assessment Technique (Amabile, 1982). Verbal creative was assessed using a modified scoring method of Guilford's alternative uses task developed by Silvia et al. (2008). Findings indicate that access to natural views, plants and the colour green increase visual creativity, but have no impact on verbal creativity in classroom settings. The results suggest that creativity is domain specific and any practical measures taken to enhance creativity need to be aligned with the target domain.

The impact of eye movements on a verbal creativity task

Bilateral eye movements (EMs) have been shown to induce cognitive enhancements for episodic memory, attention, and divergent thinking. Increased interhemispheric interaction has been suggested as a possible mechanism behind the EM effect, but other theories, including an increase in attentional control following EMs have also been proposed. The present research explored whether the bilateral EM effect could be extended to a creativity task that draws heavily on convergent thinking. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four EM conditions (bilateral, centre control, right-centre, or left-centre) and were presented with compound remote associate problems. After 7 s, participants were asked to make a solution/non-solution judgement to a target word presented in the left or right visual field. Bilateral and right-centre EM conditions exhibited enhanced performance on the task, with the bilateral condition demonstrating the best performance for solution targets and the right-centre condition presenting the best performance for non-solution targets. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of the neural components of creativity and theories surrounding the effects of EMs on cognition.

The influence of reward on the performance of verbal creative tasks: Behavioral and EEG effects

The goal of this study was to compare the effects of the verbal instruction (IN1) that stimulated originality and of monetary reward (IN2) on the efficiency of performing a verbal creative task. The EEG patterns were also compared on the basis of mapping the bioelectric potential power within the frequency range of 4 to 30 Hz. Right-handed students (10 men and 10 women) participated in the experiment. The originality of the solution improves if a monetary reward is expected. In contrast to IN1, the promise of a monetary reward caused a global increase in task-related synchronization of bioelectric potentials in the θ2 band. Hemispheric asymmetry of the power of the θ1, θ2, and α2 rhythm grows with higher values in the right hemisphere. These changes in response to IN2 were in the background EEG, which testifies that an overall increase in hemispheric asymmetry induces a preparatory state after the promise of monetary reward. Specific changes in regional brain activity were at the β2-rhythm frequency. In all posterior derivation, except for the frontotemporal ones, the power of the β2 rhythm decreased in response to IN2 in contrast to IN1. The rewardinduced changes in EEG were characteristic of men to a greater extent. An increase in the θ2-rhythm asymmetry and the power of the α rhythm was observed only in men in response to a monetary reward. Our results suggest that the promise of monetary reward is favorable for creative thinking and original solutions. Gender differences of changes in the power of bioelectric potentials suggest that the neurophysiological mechanisms of creativity are different in men and women.