Revisiting Mednick's Model on Creativity‐Related Differences in Associative Hierarchies. Evidence for a Common Path to Uncommon Thought

Abstract

Fifty years ago, Mednick [Psychological Review, 69 (1962) 220] proposed an elaborate model that aimed to explain how creative ideas are generated and why creative people are more likely to have creative ideas. The model assumes that creative people have flatter associative hierarchies and as a consequence can more fluently retrieve remote associative elements, which can be combined to form creative ideas. This study aimed at revisiting Mednick’s model and providing an extensive test of its hypotheses. A continuous free association task was employed and association performance was compared between groups high and low in creativity, as defined by divergent thinking ability and self-report measures. We found that associative hierarchies do not differ between low and high creative people, but creative people showed higher associative fluency and more uncommon responses. This suggests that creativity may not be related to a special organization of associative memory, but rather to a more effective way of accessing its contents. The findings add to the evidence associating creativity with highly adaptive executive functioning.

The “Creative Right Brain” Revisited: Individual Creativity and Associative Priming in the Right Hemisphere Relate to Hemispheric Asymmetries in Reward Brain Function

“…One prominent theory supports that high creativity is associated with being able to connect distant concepts, hence promoting the combination of remotely-connected concepts into original ideas (Mednick 1962). Thus, individual differences in creativity may implicate differences in associative processing Gruszka and Necka 2002;Benedek and Neubauer 2013;Kenett et al 2014).…”

Balancing the Fluency-Consistency Tradeoff in Collaborative Information Search with a Recommender Approach

“…In light of this additional pattern, the active role of tags in mediating the experience of novel ideas appears even more likely. From a learning perspective, this tag-based propagation of ideas is highly desirable, as it seems to broaden and flatten the hierarchy of topic-related associations and thus, supports a more creative encounter with a given topic (e.g., Benedek & Neubauer, 2013).…”

“…In our previous article, we have especially focused on convergent processes by looking at stabilizing tag vocabulary. In the present article, we draw our attention to the divergent pole of the exploration-exploitation continuum by considering effects of networked search on ideational fluency, a concept from the creative cognition literature (e.g., Benedek & Neubauer, 2013). In the present context, it describes how easily and continuously diverse ideas can be accessed from memory during information-based ideation (Kerne et al, 2008(Kerne et al, , 2014, i.e., when thinking about search topics to be explored in future queries.…”

“…Considering research in creative cognition (e.g., Smith, Ward, & Finke, 1995;Ward, 2007), this tag-based cognitive effect should reduce the dominance of pre-existing stereotyped associations and give rise to a broader (mental) fan of equally available ideas around a topic. This is also called a flatter hierarchy of associative strengths (Benedek & Neubauer, 2013;Mednick, 1962). While such a mental organization allows for a steadier stream of ideas, i.e., more fluency, the increased availability of several responses to a certain topic should simultaneously decrease tagging consistency.…”

A Bridge Too Far: Conceptual Distance and Creative Ideation

“…Network analysis suggests that less creative individuals have a semantic network that is more spread out, more modular, and less connected than more creative individuals (Kenett, Anaki, &Faust, 2014) -though Benedek andNeubauer (2013) did not find that such associative hierarchies differed between less and more creative people. With the exception of Prabhakaran, Green and Gray (2014), who showed that participants given the cue "be creative" produced responses with a higher mean semantic distance, few studies have attempted to systematically manipulate the associative hierarchies, or semantic networks, of participants.…”