The Role of Sequential Dependence in Creative Semantic Search

Smith, Kevin A.; Vul, Edward

doi:10.1111/tops.12152

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Some studies have argued that the RAT and divergent thinking tasks such as the TACT measure different creative abilities ( Lee and Therriault, 2013 ; Lee et al, 2014 ). However, other studies have shown that the RAT involves an initial divergent thinking stage ( Taft and Rossiter, 1966 ; Smith et al, 2013 ; Smith and Vul, 2015 ). For example, Smith et al (2013) analyzed the guesses participants generated while solving the RAT.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Metaphor Comprehension in Low and High Creative Individuals

2018

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The comprehension of metaphors involves the ability to activate a broader, more flexible set of semantic associations in order to integrate the meanings of the weakly related parts of the metaphor into a meaningful linguistic expression. Previous findings point to a relation between levels of creativity and efficiency in processing metaphoric expressions, as measured by reaction times (RTs) and error rates. Furthermore, recent studies have found that more creative individuals exhibit a relatively more flexible semantic memory structure compared to less creative individuals, which may facilitate their comprehension of novel metaphors. In the present study, lower and higher creative individuals performed a semantic relatedness judgment task on word pairs. These word pairs comprised four types of semantic relations: novel metaphors, conventional metaphors, literal word pairs, and meaningless word pairs. We hypothesized that the two groups will perform similarly in comprehending the literal, unrelated, and the conventional metaphoric word pairs. However, with respect to novel metaphors, we predicted that higher creative individuals will demonstrate better performance compared to lower creative individuals, as indicated by smaller RTs and more accurate responses. Our main finding shows that higher creative individuals were faster in comprehending both types of metaphors, conventional and novel, compared to lower creative individuals. Furthermore, higher creative individuals were significantly more accurate than lower creative individual only in comprehending novel metaphors. The findings are discussed in light of previous findings regarding the relation between metaphor comprehension, semantic memory, and creativity.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Metaphor Comprehension in Low and High Creative Individuals

2018

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“…Other studies explored how models of simple search processes implemented on semantic spaces. Such approaches examined how these search processes can capture memory retrieval [24][25][26] and performance in creative tasks which require cognitive search [27][28][29]. In regard to individual differences in creativity, Kenett and Austerweil [30] examined how the semantic memory structure of low and high creative individuals constrain a simulated model of a simple search process (random walk).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Viability in Multiplex Lexical Networks and Machine Learning Characterizes Human Creativity

Stella¹,

Kenett

2019

BDCC

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Previous studies have shown how individual differences in creativity relate to differences in the structure of semantic memory. However, the latter is only one aspect of the whole mental lexicon, a repository of conceptual knowledge that is considered to simultaneously include multiple types of conceptual similarities. In the current study, we apply a multiplex network approach to compute a representation of the mental lexicon combining semantics and phonology and examine how it relates to individual differences in creativity. This multiplex combination of 150,000 phonological and semantic associations identifies a core of words in the mental lexicon known as viable cluster, a kernel containing simpler to parse, more general, concrete words acquired early during language learning. We focus on low (N = 47) and high (N = 47) creative individuals’ performance in generating animal names during a semantic fluency task. We model this performance as the outcome of a mental navigation on the multiplex lexical network, going within, outside, and in-between the viable cluster. We find that low and high creative individuals differ substantially in their access to the viable cluster during the semantic fluency task. Higher creative individuals tend to access the viable cluster less frequently, with a lower uncertainty/entropy, reaching out to more peripheral words and covering longer multiplex network distances between concepts in comparison to lower creative individuals. We use these differences for constructing a machine learning classifier of creativity levels, which leads to an accuracy of 65 . 0 ± 0 . 9 % and an area under the curve of 68 . 0 ± 0 . 8 % , which are both higher than the random expectation of 50%. These results highlight the potential relevance of combining psycholinguistic measures with multiplex network models of the mental lexicon for modelling mental navigation and, consequently, classifying people automatically according to their creativity levels.

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“…Research has singled out word frequency (as a proxy for associative strength) as an important factor (Gupta et al., 19; Olteţeanu & Falomir, 34), and the ratio between the desired and the total number of associations (Oltețeanu & Schultheis, 35). Another approach to investigating the information processes underlying RAT performance was taken by having human participants document each word they considered as an answer to the RAT items (Davelaar, 12; Smith & Vul, 47; Smith et al., 46). Smith and Vul (47) related considered answers, cue words, and solutions to each other using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Landauer & Dumais, 25) which provides measures of semantic similarity between words.…”

Section: The Remote Associates Testmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consider for example the item (Mednick, 1962): rat-blue-cottage; the solution to this item would be cheese as it is associated with each one of the cue words and thus provides a connecting link between them. Based on research investigating the information processes underlying RAT performance (Smith, Huber & Vul, 2013;Smith & Vul, 2015), we evaluated an alternative scoring for the RAT which quantifies how semantically similar an answer was as compared to the designated correct solution and thereby offers potentially valuable information about inter-individual differences in RAT performance.…”

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confidence: 99%

Psychometric Evaluation of an Alternate Scoring for the Remote Associates Test

Beisemann

Forthmann

Bürkner

et al. 2019

Journal of Creative Behavior

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The Remote Associates Test (RAT; Mednick, 1962; Mednick & Mednick, 1967) is a commonly employed test of creative convergent thinking. The RAT is scored with a dichotomous scoring, scoring correct answers as 1 and all other answers as 0. Based on recent research into the information processing underlying RAT performance, we argued that the dichotomous scoring may lead to a loss of potentially relevant information. Thus, we proposed an alternate scoring based on semantic similarity between the answer given by the participant and the correct solution using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Landauer & Dumais, 1997). We evaluate the psychometric properties of the alternate LSA scoring and found evidence of construct validity for the LSA scoring which was comparable to findings for the standard scoring, but not better as we would have expected. Thus, our expectations that LSA-based scoring of the RAT counteracts potential information loss were not met. However, LSA based scorings appear to be a promising alternative for hardly solvable RAT items. We conducted additional analyses comparing different RAT item types with regard to their validity as well as evaluating the information uniquely contained in the LSA scoring. Implications of all finding for existing research using RAT items are discussed.

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The Role of Sequential Dependence in Creative Semantic Search

Cited by 11 publications

References 10 publications

Metaphor Comprehension in Low and High Creative Individuals

Metaphor Comprehension in Low and High Creative Individuals

Viability in Multiplex Lexical Networks and Machine Learning Characterizes Human Creativity

Psychometric Evaluation of an Alternate Scoring for the Remote Associates Test

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