The roles of associative and executive processes in creative cognition

Memory and Cognition

Volumn 42, Issue 7, 2014, Pages 1186-1197

  Beaty, Roger E ^a   Silvia, Paul J ^a   Nusbaum, Emily C ^a   Jauk, Emanuel ^b   Benedek, Mathias ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF GRAZ   (Austria)

Author keywords

Divergent thinking; Fluid intelligence; Latent semantic analysis; Verbal fluency

Indexed keywords

ADOLESCENT; ADULT; ASSOCIATION; COGNITION; CREATIVITY; EXECUTIVE FUNCTION; FEMALE; HUMAN; MALE; PHYSIOLOGY; YOUNG ADULT;

ADOLESCENT; ADULT; ASSOCIATION; COGNITION; CREATIVITY; EXECUTIVE FUNCTION; FEMALE; HUMANS; MALE; YOUNG ADULT;

EID: 84907681475     PISSN: 0090502X     EISSN: 15325946     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3758/s13421-014-0428-8     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by distraction: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science, 23, 1117–1122. doi:10.1177/0956797612446024
2. Barr, N., Pennycook, G., Stolz, J. A., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2014). Reasoned connections: A dual-process perspective on creative thought. Thinking & Reasoning. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/13546783.2014.895915
3. Beaty, R. E., Nusbaum, E. C., & Silvia, P. J. (2014). Does insight problem solving predict real-world creativity? Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. doi:10.1037/a0035727
4. Beaty, R. E., & Silvia, P. J. (2012). Why do ideas get more creative across time? An executive interpretation of the serial order effect in divergent thinking tasks. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6, 309–319.
5. Beaty, R. E., & Silvia, P. J. (2013). Metaphorically speaking: Cognitive abilities and the production of figurative language. Memory & Cognition, 41, 255–267. doi:10.3758/s13421-012-0258-5
6. Beaty, R. E., Smeekens, B. A., Silvia, P. J., Hodges, D. A., & Kane, M. J. (2013). A first look at the role of domain-general cognitive and creative abilities in jazz improvisation. Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 23, 262–268.
7. Benedek, M., Beaty, R., Jauk, E., Koschutnig, K., Fink, A., Silvia, P. J., … Neubauer, A. C. (2014). Creating metaphors: The neural basis of figurative language production. NeuroImage, 90, 99–106. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.12.046
8. Benedek, M., Bergner, S., Könen, T., Fink, A., & Neubauer, A. C. (2011). EEG alpha synchronization is related to top-down processing in convergent and divergent thinking. Neuropsychologia, 49, 3505–3511. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.09.004
9. Benedek, M., Franz, F., Heene, M., & Neubauer, A. C. (2012). Differential effects of cognitive inhibition and intelligence on creativity. Personality and Individual Differences, 53, 480–485.
10. Benedek, M., Könen, T., & Neubauer, A. C. (2012). Associative abilities underlying creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6, 273–281.
11. Benedek, M., Mühlmann, C., Jauk, E., & Neubauer, A. C. (2013). Assessment of divergent thinking by means of the subjective top-scoring method: Effects of the number of top-ideas and time-on-task on reliability and validity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7, 341–349.
12. Benedek, M., & Neubauer, A. C. (2013). Revisiting Mednick’s model on creativity-related differences in associative hierarchies: Evidence for a common path to uncommon thought. Journal of Creative Behavior, 47, 273–289.
13. Bowden, E. M., Jung-Beeman, M., Fleck, J., & Kounios, J. (2005). New approaches to demystifying insight. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 322–328.
14. Carroll, J. B. (1993). Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor-analytic studies. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
15. Cattell, R. B., & Cattell, A. K. S. (2008). Measuring intelligence with the Culture Fair Tests. Oxford, UK: Hogrefe. Original work published 1961.
16. Chein, J. M., & Weisberg, R. W. (2014). Working memory and insight in verbal problems: Analysis of compound remote associates. Memory & Cognition, 42, 67–83. doi:10.3758/s13421-013-0343-4
17. Christensen, P. R., Guilford, J. P., & Wilson, R. C. (1957). Relations of creative responses to working time and instructions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53, 82–88.
18. Conway, A. R. A., & Engle, R. W. (1994). Working memory and retrieval: A resource-dependent inhibition model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 123, 354–373. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.123.4.354
19. De Dreu, C. K. W., Nijstad, B. A., Bass, M., Wolsink, I., & Roskes, M. (2012). Working memory benefits creative insight, musical improvisation, and original ideation through maintained task-focused attention. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 656–669.
20. Dijksterhuis, A., & Meurs, T. (2006). Where creativity resides: The generative power of unconscious thought. Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 135–146.
21. Drewes, D. W. (2000). Beyond the Spearman–Brown: A structural approach to maximal reliability. Psychological Methods, 5, 214–227.
22. Ekstrom, R. B., French, J. W., Harman, H. H., & Dermen, D. (1976). Manual for kit of factor-referenced cognitive tests. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
23. Engle, R. W., Tuholski, S. W., Laughlin, J. E., & Conway, A. R. A. (1999). Working memory, short-term memory, and general fluid intelligence: A latent-variable approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 128, 309–331. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.128.3.309
24. Evans, J. S. B. T. (2003). In two minds: Dual process accounts of reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 454–459. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2003.08.012
25. Feist, G. J. (1998). A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 290–309.
26. Finke, R. A., Ward, T. B., & Smith, S. M. (1992). Creative cognition: Theory, research, and applications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
27. Gilhooly, K. J., Fioratou, E., Anthony, S. H., & Wynn, V. (2007). Divergent thinking: Strategies and executive involvement in generating novel uses for familiar objects. British Journal of Psychology, 98, 611–625.
28. Green, A. E., Fugelsang, J. A., & Dunbar, K. N. (2006). Automatic activation of categorical and abstract analogical relations in analogical reasoning. Memory & Cognition, 34, 1414–1421. doi:10.3758/BF03195906
29. Green, A. E., Fugelsang, J. A., Kraemer, D. J., & Dunbar, K. N. (2008). The Micro-Category account of analogy. Cognition, 106, 1004–1016. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.03.015
30. Hancock, G. R., & Mueller, R. O. (2001). Rethinking construct reliability within latent variable systems. In R. Cudeck, S. du Toit, & D. Sörbom (Eds.), Structural equation modeling: Present and future (pp. 195–216). Lincolnwood, IL: Scientific Software International.
31. Henry, J. D., Crawford, J. R., & Phillips, L. H. (2004). Verbal fluency performance in dementia of the Alzheimer’s type: A meta-analysis. Neuropsychologia, 9, 1212–1222.
32. Jauk, E., Benedek, M., Dunst, B., & Neubauer, A. C. (2013). The relationship between intelligence and creativity: New support for the threshold hypothesis by means of empirical breakpoint detection. Intelligence, 41, 212–221.
33. Jauk, E., Benedek, M., & Neubauer, A. C. (2014). The road to creative achievement: A latent variable model of ability and personality predictors. European Journal of Personality, 28, 95–105.
34. Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 9, 697–720. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.58.9.697
35. Kaufman, J. C., Plucker, J. A., & Baer, J. (2008). Essentials of creativity assessment. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
36. Kline, R. B. (2011). Principles and practice of structural equation modeling (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
37. Kounios, J., Frymiare, J. L., Bowden, E. M., Fleck, J. I., Subramaniam, K., Parrish, T. B., & Jung-Beeman, M. (2006). The prepared mind: Neural activity prior to problem presentation predicts subsequent solution by sudden insight. Psychological Science, 17, 882–890. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01798.x
38. Landauer, T. K., Foltz, P. W., & Laham, D. (1998). An introduction to latent semantic analysis. Discourse Processes, 25, 259–284. doi:10.1080/01638539809545028
39. Lee, C. S., & Therriault, D. J. (2013). The cognitive underpinnings of creative thought: A latent variable analysis exploring the roles of intelligence and working memory in three creative thinking processes. Intelligence, 41, 306–320.
40. McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (2007). Brief versions of the NEO-PI-3. Journal of Individual Differences, 28, 116–128.
41. Mednick, S. A. (1962). The associative basis of the creative process. Psychological Review, 69, 220–232.
42. Mednick, M. T., Mednick, S. A., & Jung, C. C. (1964). Continual association as a function of level of creativity and type of verbal stimulus. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 69, 511–515.
43. Mendelsohn, G. A. (1976). Associative and attentional processes in creative performance. Journal of Personality, 44, 341–369. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1976.tb00127.x
44. Milgram, R. M., & Rabkin, L. (1980). Developmental test of Mednick’s associative hierarchies of original thinking. Developmental Psychology, 16, 157–158.
45. Nusbaum, E. C., & Silvia, P. J. (2011). Are intelligence and creativity really so different? Fluid intelligence, executive processes, and strategy use in divergent thinking. Intelligence, 39, 36–45.
46. Nusbaum, E. C., Silvia, P. J., & Beaty, R. E. (2014). Ready, set, create: What instructing people to “be creative” reveals about the meaning and mechanisms of divergent thinking. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. doi:10.1037/a0036549
47. Olczak, P. V., & Kaplan, M. F. (1969). Originality and rate of response in association as a function of associative gradient. American Journal of Psychology, 82, 157–167.
48. Petersen, S. E., Fox, P. T., Posner, M. I., Mintun, M., & Raichle, M. E. (1989). Positron emission tomographic studies of the processing of single words. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1, 153–170. doi:10.1162/jocn.1989.1.2.153
49. Piers, E. V., & Kirchner, E. P. (1971). Productivity and uniqueness in continued word association as a function of subject creativity and stimulus properties. Journal of Personality, 39, 264–276.
50. Plucker, J. A. (1999). Is the proof in the pudding? Reanalyses of Torrance’s (1958 to present) longitudinal data. Creativity Research Journal, 12, 103–114.
51. Prabhakaran, R., Green, A. E., & Gray, J. R. (2013). Thin slices of creativity: Using single-word utterances to assess creative cognition. Behavior Research Methods. Advance online publication. doi:10.3758/s13428-013-0401-7
52. Runco, M. A. (2007). Creativity. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
53. Silvia, P. J. (2011). Subjective scoring of divergent thinking: Examining the reliability of unusual uses, instances, and consequences tasks. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 6, 24–30.
54. Silvia, P. J., & Beaty, R. E. (2012). Making creative metaphors: The importance of fluid intelligence for creative thought. Intelligence, 40, 343–351.
55. Silvia, P. J., Beaty, R. E., & Nusbaum, E. C. (2013). Verbal fluency and creativity: General and specific contributions of broad retrieval ability (Gr) factors to divergent thinking. Intelligence, 41, 328–340.
56. Silvia, P. J., Martin, C., & Nusbaum, E. C. (2009). A snapshot of creativity: Evaluating a quick and simple method for assessing divergent thinking. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 4, 79–85.
57. Silvia, P. J., Nusbaum, E. C., Berg, C., Martin, C., & O’Connor, A. (2009). Openness to experience, plasticity, and creativity: Exploring lower-order, higher-order, and interactive effects. Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 1087–1090.
58. Silvia, P. J., Winterstein, B. P., Willse, J. T., Barona, C. M., Cram, J. T., Hess, K. I., …. Richard, C. A. (2008). Assessing creativity with divergent thinking tasks: Exploring the reliability and validity of new subjective scoring methods. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2, 68–85.
59. Sio, U. N., & Ormerod, T. C. (2009). Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 135, 94–120. doi:10.1037/a0014212
60. Süß, H.-M., Oberauer, K., Wittmann, W. W., Wilhelm, O., & Schulze, R. (2002). Working-memory capacity explains reasoning ability—and a little bit more. Intelligence, 30, 261–288. doi:10.1016/S0160-2896(01)00100-3
61. Torrance, E. P. (1988). The nature of creativity as manifest in its testing. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The nature of creativity: Contemporary psychological perspectives (pp. 43–75). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
62. Troyer, A. K., Moscovitch, M., Winocur, G., Alexander, M. P., & Stuss, D. (1998). Clustering and switching on verbal fluency: The effects of focal frontal- and temporal-lobe lesions. Neuropsychologia, 36, 499–504.
63. Unsworth, N. (2009). Individual differences in self-initiated processing at encoding and retrieval: A latent variable analysis. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 257–266.
64. Unsworth, N., & Engle, R. W. (2007). The nature of individual differences in working memory capacity: Active maintenance in primary memory and controlled search from secondary memory. Psychological Review, 114, 104–132. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.114.1.104
65. Unsworth, N., Redick, T. S., Lakey, C. E., & Young, D. L. (2010). Lapses in sustained attention and their relation to executive and fluid abilities: An individual differences investigation. Intelligence, 38, 111–122.
66. Wallach, M. A., & Kogan, N. (1965). Modes of thinking in young children: A study of the creativity–intelligence distinction. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
67. Ward, W. C. (1969). Rate and uniqueness in children’s creative responding. Child Development, 40, 869–878.
68. Weisberg, R. W. (2006). Creativity: Understanding innovation in problem solving, science, invention, and the arts. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
69. Worthen, B. R., & Clark, P. M. (1971). Toward an improved measure of remote associational ability. Journal of Educational Measurement, 8, 113–123.
70. Zhong, C.-B., Dijksterhuis, A., & Galinsky, A. D. (2008). The merits of unconscious thought in creativity. Psychological Science, 19, 912–918. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02176.x