The susceptibility of compound remote associate problems to disruption by irrelevant sound: a Window onto the component processes underpinning creative cognition?

Abstract

Controversy exists regarding the processes involved in creative thinking with the Remote Associates Test (RAT) and the Compound Remote Associates Test (CRAT). We report three experiments that aimed to shed light on the component processes underpinning CRAT performance by using the mere presence of task-irrelevant sound as a key theoretical tool. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that CRAT performance was impaired relative to a quiet condition by the presence of sequences of changing letters and tones, respectively. In both experiments a non-changing sound (a repeated letter or a repeated tone) produced no disruption relative to quiet. Experiment 3 established that additional disruption was engendered by having to ignore meaningful speech as compared to meaningless speech. These experiments demonstrate that both semantic activation and subvocalisation are important determinants of successful creative thinking with CRAT problems. We suggest that semantic activation underpins solution-generation processes whereas subvocalisation underpins solution-evaluation processes.

Varieties of Inner Speech and Creative Potential

“…This finding can be taken as preliminary evidence for a negative relationship between the condensedness of inner speaking and some unique aspect of creative potential that is needed to perform well on the CRAT, but not on the AUT and HMT-S. This might relate to Marsh et al (2021), whose experimental studies suggest that exposing participants to changing tones or speech sounds, which allegedly interferes with inner speech production, diminishes performance on the CRAT. One explanation is that inner speech is needed to form a verbal gestalt of a solution, which is needed for evaluation and which helps to guide further memory search.…”

“…This to establish whether it is indeed the case that the properties and quality of the verbal gestalt that people synthesize to evaluate CRAT solutions, and guide subsequent memory search, is hampered by condensed inner speaking (cf. Marsh et al, 2021). Moreover, the results point toward future research to explain the potentially negative correlation of auditory hallucination proneness with divergent and convergent thinking ability (de Leede-Smith et al, 2020).…”

The influence of music environment on conceptual design creativity

“…Researchers have found that music with lyrics or sounds with comprehensible semantics tends to interfere with understanding cognitive tasks ( Martin et al, 1988 ; Braat-Eggen et al, 2017 ). This idea was also tested in a recent study ( Marsh et al, 2021 ) in which researchers manipulated the intelligibility of auditory materials in background music, and the results showed that the presence of intelligible semantic information (unrelated to the task) in background music impaired participants’ performance in CRATs, compared the control group.…”

“…In contrast, studies that found that music interfered with creativity mostly used convergent thinking as the index of creativity. Marsh et al (2021) used the CRAT as a creativity task and concluded that music with understandable semantics interfered with creative performance. Ritter and Ferguson (2017) used the Alternative Use Task (AUT) to assess the effects of music on divergent thinking and used the Remote Association Task (RAT) to evaluate convergent thinking respectively, the results found that listening to “happy” music can increase divergent thinking, but not convergent thinking.…”

“…This study aimed to explore whether the musical environment affects designers’ creativity during the conceptual design phase. Previous research has shown that musical background affects creative performance ( Bowden and Jung-Beeman, 2003 ; Marsh et al, 2021 ). As mentioned above, the creative tasks in studies where music promoted creative performance were usually divergent thinking tasks (e.g., AUT), so we assumed that music in the background would promote divergent thinking.…”