Ability To Name Unrelated Words Is A Good Test Of Creativity

By Emma L. Barratt Obtaining a solid measurement of creativity can be hugely time consuming. Well-established tests — such as the Alternative Uses Task (AUT), which asks participants to generate unusual ways to use common objects — require substantial time and effort in order to properly score participant responses. Not only that, but assessment of the creativity of responses varies wildly as a result of both the scorers’ judgements and the qualities of answers relative to the rest of the data. For example, one especially creative response amongst a sea of generic responses may garner extra points; place that same answer amongst other highly creative responses, however, and it is likely to score lower. But take heart, overstretched researchers — a new paper in PNAS suggests there may be an easier, more reliable way to measure creativity. In an effort to combat these issues, researchers led by Jay A. Olson from Harvard University have attempted to streamline the process by devising a new task which can be easily analysed by a computer algorithm. Their research suggests that the newly created measure — the Divergent Association Task (DAT) — may be at least as effective at measuring verbal creativity as other, more widely known creativity measures, with the added bonuses of being both shorter and more enjoyable to participants. The DAT relies on the concept of semantic distance, which is a measure of how related two words are to each other. Traditi...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Creativity Language Source Type: blogs