Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The associative theory of creativity suggests that creativeabilities rely on the organization of semantic associations inmemory. Recent research has demonstrated that semanticnetwork methods allow testing this hypothesis. The aim of thecurrent study was to investigate the properties of semanticnetworks at the individual level, in relation to creative abilities.Semantic judgement ratings were used to estimate individualsemantic networks, whose topological properties measured byseveral graph metrics were correlated with individual creativityscores. We found a correlation between the theoretical semanticdistance of our stimuli and the relatedness ratings given by theparticipants, demonstrating the validity of our approach.Importantly, we found a close relationship between creativeabilities assessed by an achievement questionnaire and divergentthinking tasks and individual semantic network metrics,replicating and extending previous similar findings.