The roles of associative and executive processes in creative cognition

How does the mind produce creative ideas? Past research has pointed to important roles of both executive and associative processes in creative cognition. But such work has largely focused on the influence of one ability or the other—executive or associative—so the extent to which both abilities may...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Memory & cognition Vol. 42; no. 7; pp. 1186 - 1197
Main Authors: Beaty, Roger E., Silvia, Paul J., Nusbaum, Emily C., Jauk, Emanuel, Benedek, Mathias
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Boston Springer US 01.10.2014
Springer
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Ability
Adolescent
Adult
Association
Associative processes
Attention
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Cognition - physiology
Cognition. Intelligence
Cognitive Psychology
Creativity
Cues
Divergent thinking
Executive function
Executive Function - physiology
Female
Fluency
Fluid intelligence
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Intelligence
Male
Memory
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Research applications
Retrieval
Semantic analysis
Semantics
Structural equation modeling
Studies
Variables
Young Adult
Verbal fluency
Divergent thinking
Latent semantic analysis
Fluid intelligence
Human
Executive function
Language
Cognition
Fluent intelligence
Experimental study
Creativity
ISSN:0090-502X, 1532-5946, 1532-5946
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:How does the mind produce creative ideas? Past research has pointed to important roles of both executive and associative processes in creative cognition. But such work has largely focused on the influence of one ability or the other—executive or associative—so the extent to which both abilities may jointly affect creative thought remains unclear. Using multivariate structural equation modeling, we conducted two studies to determine the relative influences of executive and associative processes in domain-general creative cognition (i.e., divergent thinking). Participants completed a series of verbal fluency tasks, and their responses were analyzed by means of latent semantic analysis (LSA) and scored for semantic distance as a measure of associative ability. Participants also completed several measures of executive function—including broad retrieval ability (Gr) and fluid intelligence (Gf). Across both studies, we found substantial effects of both associative and executive abilities: As the average semantic distance between verbal fluency responses and cues increased, so did the creative quality of divergent-thinking responses (Study 1 and Study 2 ). Moreover, the creative quality of divergent-thinking responses was predicted by the executive variables—Gr (Study 1 ) and Gf (Study 2 ). Importantly, the effects of semantic distance and the executive function variables remained robust in the same structural equation model predicting divergent thinking, suggesting unique contributions of both constructs. The present research extends recent applications of LSA in creativity research and provides support for the notion that both associative and executive processes underlie the production of novel ideas.
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ISSN:0090-502X
1532-5946
1532-5946
DOI:10.3758/s13421-014-0428-8