Creativity

Creativity research saw a boom during the Cold War when national intellectual resources were of the essence. As a result of the practical need to measure creativity in a controlled manner for the purpose of personnel selection, many of our primary methods of measuring it resemble other pen & paper aptitude tests, like IQ tests. In Smith, Bellaiche, et al. (in review), we were interested in how these common creativity tests compare to more ecologically-valid creative output, such as painting. 

Smith, A.P.*, Bellaiche, L.*, Christensen, A., Williams, C., Schooler, J., Beaty, R., Chatterjee, A., Seli., P. Back to the Basics: Correspondences Between Creativity Measures and Creative Output (Abstract Painting). Creativity Research Journal (in review).

Since the 1950s, researchers have invested heavily in creating reliable “gold-standard” creativity assessments that can be administered in controlled laboratory settings, though these efforts came at the cost of not using ecologically and face-valid tasks. Here, we describe a novel procedure—to fill this critical gap—that brings participants into the laboratory to paint abstract art, while additionally completing common laboratory-based creativity tasks and questionnaires. Of primary interest was the feasibility of administering this procedure in the laboratory. To this end, we sought to determine whether (a) participants are able to follow instructions to produce paintings, (b) participants’ paintings show sufficient variation in creativity, and (c) independent raters agree about judgments of painting quality. Second, we were interested in the domain-specificity of abstract painting and whether performance on either or both the Alternate Uses Task and the Test of Creative Imagery Abilities predicted painting quality. Finally, we examined whether painting quality was associated with personality traits, mindsets towards creative activities, fluid-intelligence, and existing creative hobbies and achievements. Our findings suggest that an in-lab painting task is both feasible and informative with regard to creativity measures, and may help to separate creativity in the visual arts domain from verbal creativity and intelligence metrics.