Number Progression Odd Letters Out What is the Nature of Creativity? Kenny L. Hicks, Conor Lacey, Tristan Hackman, & Randall W. Engle Georgia Institute of Technology Why study creativity? Creativity and intelligence have had a weak relationship since the beginning of psychometric testing (Thurstone, 1938; Guilford, 1956;1967). Creativity has demonstrated social and ecological validity, but the psychometric properties of creativity tests remain poorly understood. Background Popular Paradigms Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA) Consists of three open-ended activities. Time consuming scoring procedure with four norm-referenced abilities (fluency, originality, elaboration, and flexibility) and 15 criterion (e.g. colorfulness of imagery, humor, etc.). Remote Associates test Thought to be a measure of convergent thinking Operationalized using Mednick’s theory of associative processes. Traditional Measurement Approaches Underwhelming relationship between creativity and intelligence. Why? Heavily reliant on verbal materials (Kim, 2005). Most measures of creativity are verbal. Spatial tasks are routinely excluded from analyses because they don’t conform to the same scoring metrics. New Approaches Improved psychometrics including latent level analyses. Novel scoring procedures with an emphasis on improved and faster subjective scoring. Aims of the Current Study Address limitations of traditional scoring methods of divergent thinking with a novel scoring procedure. Determine the relationship between key components of creative production: divergent and convergent thinking, and their predictors. . Method Subjects: 445 Subjects from Georgia Tech and the Atlanta community. Tasks Matrix Reasoning Number Progression Odd Letters Out Scoring procedure: Raters assign scores of 1-3 on each creative response. Each response evaluated on one or more of four specific attributes (humor, irony, insight, smart). Standardized scoring for verbal and figural tasks. Analyses Conclusions We found that fluid intelligence predicted both the Divergent and Convergent aspects of Creativity. In fact, the latent variable created from the Torrance accounted for 50% of fluid intelligence. This was a massive improvement over the meta-analytic results of previous studies which found that the two shared a mere 4%, or nothing at all. This study included more rigorous task batteries than most studies of creativity, a larger sample size, and novel scoring procedure that emphasized the quality of creative ideas. This work contributes new evidence that the most predictive aspect of creative problem solving is divergent thinking. References Guilford, J. P. (1956). The structure of intellect. Psychological bulletin, 53(4), 267. Guilford, J. P. (1967). Creativity: Yesterday, today and tomorrow. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 1(1), 3-14. Kim, K. H. (2005). Can only intelligent people be creative? A meta-analysis. Prufrock Journal, 16(2-3), 57-66. Intelligence Creativity Ravens, Letter Sets, Number Series Abbreviated Adult Test of the Torrance test of Creativity. Creativity: Activities from the ATTA Intelligence: Ravens, Number Series, Letter Sets Funding: Office of Naval Research N00014-12-1-0406