Conscious Augmentation of Creative State Enhances "Real" Creativity in Open-Ended Analogical Reasoning

PLoS One. 2016 Mar 9;11(3):e0150773. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0150773. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Humans have an impressive ability to augment their creative state (i.e., to consciously try and succeed at thinking more creatively). Though this "thinking cap" phenomenon is commonly experienced, the range of its potential has not been fully explored by creativity research, which has often focused instead on creativity as a trait. A key question concerns the extent to which conscious augmentation of state creativity can improve creative reasoning. Although artistic creativity is also of great interest, it is creative reasoning that frequently leads to innovative advances in science and industry. Here, we studied state creativity in analogical reasoning, a form of relational reasoning that spans the conceptual divide between intelligence and creativity and is a core mechanism for creative innovation. Participants performed a novel Analogy Finding Task paradigm in which they sought valid analogical connections in a matrix of word-pairs. An explicit creativity cue elicited formation of substantially more creative analogical connections (measured via latent semantic analysis). Critically, the increase in creative analogy formation was not due to a generally more liberal criterion for analogy formation (that is, it appeared to reflect "real" creativity rather than divergence at the expense of appropriateness). The use of an online sample provided evidence that state creativity augmentation can be successfully elicited by remote cuing in an online environment. Analysis of an intelligence measure provided preliminary indication that the influential "threshold hypothesis," which has been proposed to characterize the relationship between intelligence and trait creativity, may be extensible to the new domain of state creativity.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Consciousness*
  • Creativity*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Intelligence
  • Intelligence Tests
  • Male
  • Pilot Projects
  • Semantics
  • Thinking*

Grants and funding

This research was supported by awards from the National Science Foundation (DRL-1420481; http://www.nsf.gov/), The John Templeton Foundation (#51971; www.templeton.org), and Pymetrics (pymetrics.com) to A. Green. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.