ABSTRACT: This study examined the relationshipsbetween creativity and associative memory processes.Participants were shown pairs of words, with theinstruction to say yes if they could discern any asso-ciative connection between the words, or no other-wise. The second word of every pair was preceded byexposition of a prime (200 ms). Positive primes werebased on meaning or spelling similarity with the tar-get word, whereas neutral control primes were eitherunrelated words or nonsensical letter strings. Creativepeople differed from less creative people in readinessto accept word associations and susceptibility topriming. Two bottom-up cognitive explanations of theoutcomes of this study are supplemented with 2 top-down explanations, pertaining to the motivationalprocesses.This article is concentrated on the problem of howcreativity relates to the basic processes of humanassociative memory. The cognitive approach to cre-ativity (e.g., Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Ne¸cka,1995a, in press) consists of the study of simple con-stitutive elements of the creative thought, intended toaccount for creativity using elementary cognitivecomponents. Such an approach may help us describethe complex phenomenon of creativity in terms ofsimpler, better defined, and experimentally well-operationalized cognitive processes. It also allows tocombine two methods of empirical psychology,experimental and correlational, in the study of cre-ativity (Eysenck, 1995).It is well known that creative people associatethings in a specific way (Mednick, 1962; Mednick &Mednick, 1964). They make more associations, espe-cially remote ones, and they make them easily. Also,the slope of their “associative hierarchy” is relativelyflat, meaning they typically do not tend to respond tothe stimulus word with some specific, highly pre-dictable word. Rather, they are likely to respond withan unexpected, unpredictable association (Mednick,1962; Mednick & Mednick, 1964). This finding isempirically well confirmed; therefore, the associativetasks are widely used, in addition to the divergentthinking tasks, in the assessment tools measuring thelevel of creative abilities (e.g., Eysenck, 1994). Asso-ciations are also popular in many training techniquesemployed to enhance human creative potential (e.g.,Ne¸cka, 1992; Prince, 1978).The question that arises is how the remote associa-tion studies can help us develop the theory of creativethought. One such theory was proposed by Mednick(1962), who suspected that two remote ideas may beassociated because of their frequent coincidence in thepast, because of the perceived similarity of the objectsthey represent, or because of the mediating function ofa third idea. Koestler’s (1964) idea of “bisociation” isalso referred to in this tradition. Creativity is certainlytoo complex to be confined to the associative mecha-nisms; however, the importance of these mechanismsCreativity Research Journal 2002, Vol. 14, No. 2, 193–205Copyright 2002 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.Creativity Research Journal 193Priming and Acceptance of Close and Remote Associations by Creative and Less Creative PeopleAleksandra Gruszka and Edward Ne¸ckaJagiellonian University, Cracow, PolandThe empirical data presented in this article have been gathered bythe first author as a part of her master’s thesis in psychology,defended at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.The authors wish to thank the members of Edward Ne¸cka’s researchgroup for their help in conducting the research and analysis of thedata. Wolfhart Matthäus from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany,was very helpful in providing feedback and in-depth criticism atvarious stages of the research project, particularly during the dis-cussion of results.Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent toEdward Ne¸cka, Uniwersytet Jagiellon´ski, Instytut Psychologii,Aleja Mickiewicza 3, 31-120 Kraków, Poland. E-mail:[email protected] emphasized by many conceptions of creativity (e.g.,de Bono, 1970; Finke et al., 1992; Ne¸cka, 1995b;Proctor, 1993).Apart from creativity studies, the analysis of asso-ciations also serves as a method to investigate theorganization of semantic knowledge. Cognitive mod-els usually rely on the assumption that memory isorganized as a semantic network (Anderson, 1983a,1983b). Conceptual knowledge is hypothesized to beretained in long-term memory in the form of the net-work of mutually interconnected nodes, whose activa-tion is responsible for remembering and retrieval. Inother words, a particular concept can be retrievedfrom the semantic network to the extent in which it isactivated (Collins & Loftus, 1975). Interconnectionsamong the nodes have weights that reflect the proba-bility that the activation of a node influences the acti-vation of neighboring nodes. The weights are deter-mined by long-term associative learning. Thesemodels of memory assume that activation, once initi-ated, spreads over the neighboring nodes along thepaths of semantic network, simultaneously in alldirections defined by the structure of the network.Hence, activation of a single concept increases theactivation of many interconnected concepts. However,the activation incited in this way weakens with timeand with semantic “distance” between the nodes. Itcan be also inhibited by the concurrent activity of thesemantic network, which might have started while theinitial activation was already spreading (Yantis &Meyer, 1988).Taking into account that associative processes arevital for both creativity and memory, empirical studieson the organization and activity of semantic memory,carried out from the creativity perspective, arerequired. The opinion that the idea-generationprocesses, including the pivotal moments of insight,are basically memory-related phenomena is gainingmore attention in modern theorizing (e.g., Finke et al.,1992; Langley & Jones, 1988). However, empiricalstudies of this kind are still rare.An interesting link between the associative theoriesof creativity and the network models of semanticmemory has been proposed by Rychlicka (see Ne¸cka,1994). Her participants were supposed to decidewhether two words presented to them were related.Half of the pairs of words formed close associations(e.g., chair–table), and half formed remote associa-tions (e.g., chair–grass). Moreover, Rychlicka intro-duced three values of the stimulus onset asynchrony(SOA): The second word of the pair appeared
View Full Document
Unlocking...