Ecological Momentary Assessment of Creative Ideation

Abstract

Abstract. Creative ideas in daily life show substantial variation in quality. Yet, most studies investigate the creative ideation process in highly controlled laboratory contexts, which challenges the ecological validity of creativity research findings. In this article, we advocate the use of ambulatory assessments of creative ideation to gain deeper insight into the variability of ideation processes (between- and within-subjects) in everyday life. We demonstrate this approach by the example of the ambulatory battery of creativity (ABC), which constitutes a reliable and valid approach to assess divergent thinking ability in the verbal and figural domain in everyday life context. Furthermore, it differentiates between-person and within-person variation of creative ideation performance. The first part of this paper will shortly describe the general approach using ABC as an example. In the second part, we use the 7 C’s heuristic to explore applications and implications of this novel method for creativity research. We focus on four C’s with special relevance for ambulatory assessment: Creator, Creating, Context, and Curricula. To this end, we review the findings of strongly controlled laboratory studies and discuss and illustrate applications of the ambulatory assessment. We conclude that the assessment of creative ideation performance in the field might help move the spotlight of creative ideation research from the laboratory to more naturalistic settings. This would increase the ecological validity of creative ideation research and facilitate fresh or unprecedented perspectives on past and future questions on a person’s creative potential and its moment-to-moment fluctuation.

Age-related differences in creative cognition: The mediating role of executive functions and associative processes.

“…Another potential limitation of the current study is that it was focused on verbal creativity using cognitive tasks. The inclusion of other manifestations of creativity (e.g., visual or graphic), as well as other more subjective measures (such as self-assessment or creative achievements in the real world) could provide more complete information (Rominger et al, 2022; Zabelina et al, 2019). Although we have employed the widely used Alternate Uses Task (AUT), the use of additional creativity tasks, more related to the product and the function of problems to be solved in real-world (see Cropley et al, 2017), would contribute toward gaining a better understanding of age changes in creativity.…”

Step-by-step to more creativity: The number of steps in everyday life is related to creative ideation performance.

“…The ABC measures creative ideation performance in everyday life context and shows valid and reliable within-person and between-person variation of creative ideation performance (Rominger, Fink, Benedek, Weber, Perchtold-Stefan, & Papousek, 2022; Rominger, Fink, Benedek, Weber, Perchtold-Stefan, & Schwerdtfeger, 2022; see Rominger, Schwerdtfeger, et al, 2022, for an overview). As described in previous studies, the verbal ABC is a modification of the Alternative Uses task (Guilford, 1967), which randomly presents one of 30 conventional everyday objects (e.g., brick, rope) per prompt.…”

“…In addition to PAA, we also assessed interest and joy as an additional facet of positive affect (positive-interested affect [PIA]; Egloff et al, 2003) because of its putative motivational role in task performance (e.g., Isen & Reeve, 2005). We applied the Ambulatory Battery of Creativity (ABC), which has proved a reliable and valid tool to measure creative ideation performance in everyday life contexts (Rominger, Fink, Benedek, Weber, Perchtold-Stefan, & Papousek, 2022; for an overview, see Rominger, Schwerdtfeger, et al, 2022). Notably, the ABC in combination with acceleration sensors allows to assess the number of steps taken before working on creative ideation tasks on a momentary level.…”

Experiencing more meaningful coincidences is associated with more real-life creativity? Insights from three empirical studies

“…When taking the effect sizes into account, we can conclude that if there is any association at all, it is likely small. Therefore, future studies with larger samples have to investigate this association more deeply and should also place emphasis on possible within-person associations of meaningful coincidences and creative abilities (see e.g., [27,69]).…”