Are All Remote Associates Tests Equal? An Overview of the Remote Associates Test in Different Languages

Scaling a common assessment of associative ability: Development and validation of a multiple-choice compound remote associates task

The assessment of creativity as an individual difference has historically focused on divergent thinking, which is increasingly viewed as involving the associative processes that are also understood to be a key component of creative potential. Research on associative processes has proliferated in many sub-fields, often using Compound Remote Associates (CRA) tasks with an open response format and relatively small participant samples. In the present work, we introduce a new format that is more amenable to large-scale data collection in survey designs, and present evidence for the reliability and validity of CRA measures in general using multiple large samples. Study 1 uses a large, representative dataset (N = 1,323,480) to demonstrate strong unidimensionality and internal consistency (α = .97; ωt = .87), as well as links to individual differences in temperament, cognitive ability, occupation, and job characteristics. Study 2 uses an undergraduate sample (N = 685) to validate the use of a multiple-choice format relative to the traditional approach. Study 3 uses a crowdsourced sample (N = 357) to demonstrate high test-retest reliability of the items (r =.74). Finally, Study 4 uses a sample that overlaps with Study 1 (N = 1,502,922) to provide item response theory (IRT) parameters for a large set of high-quality CRA items that use a multiple-choice response mode, thus facilitating their use in future research on creativity, insight, and related topics.

The influence of music environment on conceptual design creativity

Introduction

Creativity plays an important role in design. However, there have been mixed results about whether music, as an environmental stimulus, improves design creativity performance.

Methods

Participants were 57 design major students who were randomly assigned to one of three groups, with 19 students in each group: no music, pure music, and music with intelligible semantic information (unrelated to the task) playing in the background. Each participant completed a design task (design a tool for storing painting materials), with two phases in it, one that involved idea generation (divergent thinking) and one that involved idea evaluation (convergent thinking). Performance in the two phases was rated based on six indices of creativity (fluency; flexibility; adaptability; feasibility; usefulness; novelty) and overall design creativity (ODC).

Results

The results of one-way ANOVAs with Bonferroni correction showed that neither music environment had a significant influence on divergent thinking in idea generation nor convergent thinking in idea evaluation. However, both music environments had a significantly positive effect on novelty and ODC.

Discussion

We discuss the implications of our current results for fostering designers' creativity performance.

Assessing creativity independently of language: A language-independent remote associate task (LI-RAT)

Most creativity measures are either complex or language-dependent, hindering cross-cultural creativity assessment. We have therefore developed and tested a simple, language-independent insight task based on pictures in the style of the widely used verbal remote associate task (RAT). We demonstrate that the language-independent RAT (LI-RAT) allows assessment of different aspects of insight across large samples with different languages. It also correlates with other creativity and general problem-solving tasks. The entire stimulus set, including its preliminary normative data, is made freely available. This information can be used to select items based on accuracy, mean solution time, likelihood to produce an insight, or conceptual and perceptual similarity between the pictures per item.