Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Creativity is often considered a static trait, but recent work has shown that a creative state can be induced through explicitinstruction to be creative. A two-term verbal analogy generation task (e.g., GLOVE : HAND :: : ) that includeda randomized instruction to Answer Creatively vs. Answer Quickly was used to explore the impact of state creativity,and convergent and divergent thinking upon the creativity (i.e., semantic distance) of the generated analogies. Resultsconfirm that instruction to Answer Creatively yielded more semantically distant analogies. Additionally, the magnitudeof improvement between instructional conditions was predicted by performance in the Quickly condition. Participantsproducing less creative analogies in the Quickly condition benefited substantially, whereas participants producing morecreative analogies benefited less. Convergent and divergent thinking predicted more creative analogies in the Quicklycondition but not in the Creatively condition.