Are intelligence and creativity really so different?☆Fluid intelligence, executive processes, and strategy use in divergent thinking

Abstract

Contemporary creativity research views intelligence and creativity as essentially unrelated abilities, and many studies have found only modest correlations between them. The present research, based on improved approaches to creativity assessment and latent variable modeling, proposes that fluid and executive cognition is in fact central to creative thought. In Study 1, the substantial effect of fluid intelligence (Gf) on creativity was mediated by executive switching, the number of times people switched idea categories during the divergent thinking tasks. In Study 2, half the sample was given an effective strategy for an unusual uses task. The strategy condition interacted with Gf: people high in Gf did better when given the strategy, consistent with their higher ability to maintain access to it and use it despite interference. Taken together, the findings suggest that divergent thinking is more convergent than modern creativity theories presume.

Are Openness and Intellect distinct aspects of Openness to Experience? A test of the O/I model

“…An extensive literature examines how these three domains relate. Openness to Experience is the most closely linked of the five factors to both intelligence (DeYoung, in press) and to creativity (Silvia, Nusbaum et al, 2009), and intelligence and creativity in turn relate at least modestly (Kim, 2005 andKim et al, 2010), although this remains controversial Silvia, 2011 andSilvia, 2008). Differentiating Openness to Experience into openness and intellect aspects might shed some light on this network of relationships.…”

“…People completed a wide range of tasks and questionnaires; the present analyses focus on the relations of creativity, intelligence, and personality, which have not been previously analyzed or reported (see Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011, Study 2).…”

Flexible or leaky attention in creative people? Distinct patterns of attention for different types of creative thinking

“…Prior evidence has suggested that creative people or creative acts are associated with distinct types of attention. However, several variant relations between creativity and attention have been posited, such as creativity relating to the broad attentional scope (Ansburg & Hill, 2003), "leaky" attention, i.e., attention that allows "irrelevant" information to be noticed (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2003;Mendelsohn & Griswold, 1964;Rawlings, 1985), broad conceptual scope (Rowe, Hirsh & Anderson, 2007), flexible attention (Vartanian, Martindale, & Kwiatkowski, 2007;Zabelina & Robinson, 2010), and executive cognition, which relies heavily on the ability to focus attention (Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011). These distinctions may arise because there are numerous forms, or measures, of creativity, such as successful performance on laboratory tests of divergent thinking, which assess the ability to find multiple solutions to a given problem within a limited amount of time, versus a measure of people's realworld creative achievements, assessed by a survey of people's creative achievements over their lifetime, as well as numerous forms of attention, with multiple components to each.…”

Methodological Issues in Measuring Creativity: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Perhaps this is not surprising given that many of the creativity instruments were developed and standardized before the advent of modern psychometric analyses (Fishkin in creativity research, and although limited, their results are promising. These efforts addressed some critical issues in creativity measurement, such as evaluating reliability and validity (Chermahini, Hickendorff, & Hommel, 2012;Karwowski, 2014;Lee, Lee, & Youn, 2005;Primi, 2014;Silvia, 2011;Silvia et al, 2008;Wang, Ho, Cheng, & Cheng, 2014;Zampetakis, 2010), testing domain-specificity of creativity (Barbot, Tan, Randi, SantaDonato, & Grigorenko, 2012;Chen et al, 2006;Silvia, Kaufman, & Pretz, 2009), evaluating the rater's effect on performance assessment (Hung, Chen, & Chen, 2012) and modelling relationships between creativity and other constructs (Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011;Silvia, 2008). Expanding the use of these modern analyses could provide a better understanding of conflicting results in creativity research.…”