Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Creative exploration is shaped by the functional pressures placed on signals. Yet we know little about how those pressures structure exploration, or how they connect to individual creativity and task constraints. Using a rhythm production task, we investigate how signal space exploration is affected by constraints in a communicative or musical act, as well as the presence of feedback. We quantify exploration using three measures: distance, novelty and syncopation, following our preregistered analysis. Rhythms produced in the music task were more novel and more syncopated than those produced in the communicative task, suggesting a communicative pressure towards more predictable structures. Feedback reduced novelty and syncopation, while increasing distance. These findings reveal how functional pressures shape signals and call for more research on how collective creativity and environmental constraints shape cultural acts across domains.