Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Creative thinking has long been associated with spreading ofactivation through concepts within semantic networks. Herewe examine one potential influence on spreading activationknown as the fan effect: increasing concept knowledge leads toincreasing interference from related concepts. We testedwhether cue association size—an index of semantic richnessreflecting the average number of elements associated with aconcept—impacts the quantity and quality of responsesgenerated during the alternate uses task (AUT). Wehypothesized that low-association AUT cues should benefitquality at the cost of quantity because such cues are embeddedwithin a semantic network with fewer conceptual elements,thus yielding lesser interference from closely-related concepts.This hypothesis was confirmed in Study 1. Study 2 replicatedthe effect and found an interaction with fluid intelligence,indicating that cognitive control can overcome constraints ofsemantic knowledge. The findings thus highlight costs andbenefits of semantic knowledge for creative cognition.