Creativity Research Journal 2002 Vol 14 No 2 193 205 Copyright 2002 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc Priming and Acceptance of Close and Remote Associations by Creative and Less Creative People Aleksandra Gruszka and Edward Ne cka Jagiellonian University Cracow Poland ABSTRACT This study examined the relationships between creativity and associative memory processes Participants were shown pairs of words with the instruction to say yes if they could discern any associative connection between the words or no otherwise The second word of every pair was preceded by exposition of a prime 200 ms Positive primes were based on meaning or spelling similarity with the target word whereas neutral control primes were either unrelated words or nonsensical letter strings Creative people differed from less creative people in readiness to accept word associations and susceptibility to priming Two bottom up cognitive explanations of the outcomes of this study are supplemented with 2 topdown explanations pertaining to the motivational processes This article is concentrated on the problem of how creativity relates to the basic processes of human associative memory The cognitive approach to creativity e g Finke Ward Smith 1992 Ne cka 1995a in press consists of the study of simple constitutive elements of the creative thought intended to account for creativity using elementary cognitive components Such an approach may help us describe the complex phenomenon of creativity in terms of simpler better defined and experimentally welloperationalized cognitive processes It also allows to combine two methods of empirical psychology experimental and correlational in the study of creativity Eysenck 1995 It is well known that creative people associate things in a specific way Mednick 1962 Mednick Mednick 1964 They make more associations especially remote ones and they make them easily Also the slope of their associative hierarchy is relatively Creativity Research Journal flat meaning they typically do not tend to respond to the stimulus word with some specific highly predictable word Rather they are likely to respond with an unexpected unpredictable association Mednick 1962 Mednick Mednick 1964 This finding is empirically well confirmed therefore the associative tasks are widely used in addition to the divergent thinking tasks in the assessment tools measuring the level of creative abilities e g Eysenck 1994 Associations are also popular in many training techniques employed to enhance human creative potential e g Ne cka 1992 Prince 1978 The question that arises is how the remote association studies can help us develop the theory of creative thought One such theory was proposed by Mednick 1962 who suspected that two remote ideas may be associated because of their frequent coincidence in the past because of the perceived similarity of the objects they represent or because of the mediating function of a third idea Koestler s 1964 idea of bisociation is also referred to in this tradition Creativity is certainly too complex to be confined to the associative mechanisms however the importance of these mechanisms The empirical data presented in this article have been gathered by the 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 research group for their help in conducting the research and analysis of the data Wolfhart Matth us from Ruhr Universit t Bochum Germany was very helpful in providing feedback and in depth criticism at various stages of the research project particularly during the discussion of results Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Edward Ne cka Uniwersytet Jagiellon ski Instytut Psychologii Aleja Mickiewicza 3 31 120 Krak w Poland E mail EdNecka apple phils uj edu pl 193 A Gruszka and E Ne cka is 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 associations also serves as a method to investigate the organization of semantic knowledge Cognitive models usually rely on the assumption that memory is organized as a semantic network Anderson 1983a 1983b Conceptual knowledge is hypothesized to be retained in long term memory in the form of the network of mutually interconnected nodes whose activation is responsible for remembering and retrieval In other words a particular concept can be retrieved from the semantic network to the extent in which it is activated Collins Loftus 1975 Interconnections among the nodes have weights that reflect the probability that the activation of a node influences the activation of neighboring nodes The weights are determined by long term associative learning These models of memory assume that activation once initiated spreads over the neighboring nodes along the paths of semantic network simultaneously in all directions defined by the structure of the network Hence activation of a single concept increases the activation of many interconnected concepts However the activation incited in this way weakens with time and with semantic distance between the nodes It can be also inhibited by the concurrent activity of the semantic network which might have started while the initial activation was already spreading Yantis Meyer 1988 Taking into account that associative processes are vital for both creativity and memory empirical studies on the organization and activity of semantic memory carried out from the creativity perspective are required The opinion that the idea generation processes including the pivotal moments of insight are basically memory related phenomena is gaining more attention in modern theorizing e g Finke et al 1992 Langley Jones 1988 However empirical studies of this kind are still rare An interesting link between the associative theories of creativity and the network models of semantic memory has been proposed by Rychlicka see Ne cka 1994 Her participants were supposed to decide whether two words presented to them were related Half of the pairs of words formed close associations e g chair table and half formed remote associations e g chair grass Moreover Rychlicka intro 194 duced three values of the stimulus onset asynchrony SOA The second word of the pair appeared either simultaneously with the first or after 3 or 6 sec Participants were supposed to evaluate whether the words were associated It appeared that the
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