Measuring creativity, one word at a time
People who are more creative can think of ideas with greater 'distances' between them

Date:
July 27, 2021
Source:
McGill University
Summary:
Can you think of three words that are completely unrelated to
one another? What about four, five, or even ten? According to
researchers, this simple exercise of naming unrelated words and
then measuring the semantic distance between them could serve as
an objective measure of creativity.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
Can you think of three words that are completely unrelated to one
another? What about four, five, or even ten? According to an international
team of researchers from McGill University, Harvard University and the University of Melbourne, this simple exercise of naming unrelated words
and then measuring the semantic distance between them could serve as an objective measure of creativity.


==========================================================================
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, uses the Divergent Association Task (DAT), a 4-minute, 10-word
test to measure one aspect of creative potential.

The DAT was originally devised by Jay Olson, a recent PhD graduate from McGill's Department of Psychiatry, inspired by a childhood game involving thinking of unrelated words. He wondered whether a similar task could
serve as a simple and elegant way to measure divergent thinking, the
ability to generate diverse solutions to an open-ended problem.

While studies of creativity and its nature are not new, relatively little
is known about the process itself.

"Creativity is fundamental to human life," explains Olson, who is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard. "The more we understand its complexity,
the better we can foster creativity in all its forms." An easier and
simpler way to test creativity Using the DAT, the researchers asked participants to name 10 words that were as different from each other
as possible. A computational algorithm would then estimate the average
semantic distance between the words. The more related the words were
(e.g., "cat" and "dog") the shorter the semantic difference would be,
compared to less related words (e.g., "cat" and "book").

The team's first study highlighted moderate to strong correlations
between semantic distance and two commonly used creativity measures (the Alternative Uses Task and the Bridge-the-Associative Gap Task). This was applied to a subsequent study with 8,500 participants from 98 countries,
where the semantic distances varied only slightly by demographic variables suggesting that the measure can be used across diverse populations.

Overall, semantic distance correlated at least as strongly with
established creativity measures as those measures did with each
other. Many traditional creativity measures require time-intensive
and subjective scoring procedures, which makes large and multicultural assessments difficult.

"Our task measures only a sliver of one type of creativity,"
says Olson. "But these findings enable creativity assessments
across larger and more diverse samples with less bias, which will
ultimately help us better understand this fundamental human ability." ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by McGill_University. Note: Content
may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Jay A. Olson, Johnny Nahas, Denis Chmoulevitch, Simon J. Cropper,
Margaret E. Webb. Naming unrelated words predicts
creativity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021;
118 (25): e2022340118 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2022340118 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210727111921.htm

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