The Remote Associates Test is a well‐established measure, frequently used to assess individuals’ creative abilities, as a function of the ability to elicit remote associates. The nature of the involved associative processes is still poorly understood. This hampers a deeper understanding of the creative process, rendering it difficult to determine what factors are controlled for, when the RAT is employed. We report an experiment that sheds further light on the nature of the associative process by manipulating (a) the frequency with which a pair of items are associated as associative strength, and (b) the probability of reaching the answer given the strength and the spread. Experimental results indicate a clear and surprisingly separate influence of frequency and probability on accuracy and response times. Frequency and probability both are thus factors that need to be included in the modeling process and controlled for when using the RAT to assess creativity.
Human creativity is usually assessed with a variety of established creativity tests. One of this is the Remote Associates Test (RAT), which aims to measure the ability of reaching remote associates with linguistic stimuli. A well known variant of the RAT exists-the compound RAT, for which normative data and solvers have been proposed in the literature. However, a different type of RAT was proposed in 1971 by Worthen and Clark-a functional form which had the potential of measuring other types of associations. However, the few test items proposed by Worthen and Clark where lost during archive transport, and cannot be accessed. In this paper, we set to reconstruct an ample set of functional items in the spirit of Worthen and Clark's idea, using information science techniques. Cognitive word associates are used as data. The process of a former computational solver of the RAT is repurposed to create rather than solve items. The approach of constructing queries is evaluated by getting human participants to solve both functional and compound items. In the process, a
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