The associative basis of the creative process.
1962/01/01 by Sarnoff Mednick, Sarnoff A. Mednick · 4,132 citations
Mathematics · Psychology · #Associative property #Basis (linear algebra) #Cognitive psychology #Cognitive science #Computer science #Creativity in Education and Neuroscience #Mathematics #Process (computing) #Psychology
paper · doi:10.1037/h0048850
published in Psychological Review 69(3), 220-232 (American Psychological Association)
openalex publication_date 1962/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
Abstract
The intent of this paper is the presentation of an associative interpretation of the process of creative thinking. The explanation is not directed to any specific field of application such as art or science but attempts to delineate processes that underlie all creative thought. The discussion will take the following form, (a) First, we will define creative thinking in associative terms and indicate three ways in which creative solutions may be achieved—serendipity, similarity, and mediation, (b) This definition will allow us to deduce those individual difference variables which will facilitate creative performance, (c) Consideration of the definition of the creative process has suggested an operational statement of the definition in the form of a test. The test will be briefly described along with some preliminary research results. (d) The paper will conclude with a discussion of predictions regarding the influence of certain experimentally manipulable variables upon the creative process. Creative individuals and the processes by which they manifest their creativity have excited a good deal of
Cited by
- The index of autonomous functioning: Development of a scale of human autonomy
- Psychedelic Agents in Creative Problem-Solving: A Pilot Study
- Discovery by Dreaming: Cross-Domain Recombination in Artificial Memory
- ReMIND: Orchestrating Modular Large Language Models for Controllable Serendipity A REM-Inspired System Design for Emergent Creative Ideation
- Semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution
- Statistical learning and representational drift: A dynamic substrate for memories
- Investigating age-related differences in semantic control mechanisms involved in creative cognition
- Experimental tests of the tertiary transfer effect of intergroup contact: Addressing valence, prototypicality and moderators
- Expertise Elevates AI Usage: Experimental Evidence Comparing Laypeople and Professional Artists
- Towards Circuit Mechanisms of the Creative Process
- Exploration vs. Fixation: Scaffolding Divergent and Convergent Thinking for Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models
- Vibe Spaces for Creatively Connecting and Expressing Visual Concepts
- Does AI Usage Diminish Human Creativity?: How Goal Orientation Theory Moderates the Negative Effects Between AI Usage and Creative Output
- Changing the Perspective: Using a Cognitive Model to Improve thinkLets for Ideation
- Training Emergent Joint Associations: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Creative Thinking in Language Models
- MM-OPERA: Benchmarking Open-ended Association Reasoning for Large Vision-Language Models
- From Guilford to Creative Synergy: Opening the Black Box of Team-Level Creativity
- Revisiting Individual Creativity Assessment: Triangulation in Subjective and Objective Assessment Methods
- Metacognition as a Moderator of Creative Ideation and Creative Production
- Accelerating Creativity: Effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on the Temporal Dynamics of Divergent Thinking
- Are False Memory and Creative Thinking Mediated by Common Neural Substrates? An fMRI Meta-Analysis
- Peering Through the Kaleidoscope: A Systematic Review of Creativity Assessments Within PK-12 Settings
- Harnessing the Creative Potential among Users*
- Natural beauty and human potential: Examining aesthetic, cognitive, and emotional states in natural, biophilic, and control environments
- The Causal Role of the Left Angular Gyrus in Creativity-Driven Restructuring
- The combined well-being effects of social media activities: how self-affirmation can buffer against upward social comparisons on Instagram
- Artificial intelligence in education: A systematic literature review
- Creative ideation, broad retrieval ability, and processing speed: A confirmatory study of nested cognitive abilities
- CresOWLve: Benchmarking Creative Problem-Solving Over Real-World Knowledge
- The Breadth Premium: Measuring the Firm-level Impact of CEO Career Breadth
- Creative Subprocess Frequencies and Their Relation to Personal Characteristics and Product Creativity: Insights from a Drawing Task Think Aloud Study
- Deep Associations, High Creativity: A Simple yet Effective Metric for Evaluating Large Language Models
- An empirical investigation of the impact of ChatGPT on creativity
- Imagination and Creativity: A Necessary Connection?
- The neural basis of creative thought: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of 787 experiments
- The two-fold model of creativity: the neural underpinnings of the generation and evaluation of creative ideas
- Objective and subjective cognitive enhancing effects of mixed amphetamine salts in healthy people
- Diffusion model-based image generation from rat brain activity
- Handedness and creativity: Facts and fictions
- Evaluating the Creativity of LLMs in Persian Literary Text Generation
- AssoCiAm: A Benchmark for Evaluating Association Thinking while Circumventing Ambiguity
- Why the standard definition of creativity fails to capture the creative act
- An Influence of Positive Affect on Decision Making in Complex Situations: Theoretical Issues With Practical Implications
- A Meta-Analysis of the Relation between Creative Self-Efficacy and Different Creativity Measurements
- Can Traditional Divergent Thinking Tests Be Trusted in Measuring and Predicting Real-World Creativity?
- The Process Definition of Creativity
- The Role of Knowledge in Creative Thinking
- Feeling Creative, Being Creative: An Empirical Study of Diversity and Creativity in Teams
- Ambiguity invokes Creativity : looking through Quantum physics
- Neurocognitive Informatics Manifesto
- Cognitive flexibility and religious disbelief
- Flexibility mindsets: Reducing biases that result from spontaneous processing
- Memory and creativity: A meta-analytic examination of the relationship between memory systems and creative cognition
- Non-Linear Relationships Between Creativity Ratings of Musical Improvisations and Melodic Complexity
- Combinatorial Creativity: A New Frontier in Generalization Abilities
- How subjective idea valuation energizes and guides creative idea generation.
- The role of the default mode network in creativity
- Intelligence, creativity, and cognitive control: The common and differential involvement of executive functions in intelligence and creativity
- Creative reasoning across developmental levels: Convergence and divergence in problem creation
- The Effects of IT-Enabled Cognitive Stimulation Tools on Creative Problem Solving: A Dual Pathway to Creativity
- K-clique percolation in free association networks. The mechanism behind the 7 ± 2 law ?
- Avatars and Environments for Meetings in Social VR: What Styles and Choices Matter to People in Group Creativity Tasks?
- The cognitive neuroscience of creativity
- Explaining Creative Artifacts
- Tackling creativity at its roots: Evidence for different patterns of EEG alpha activity related to convergent and divergent modes of task processing
- Enhancing divergent thinking in visual arts education: Effects of explicit instruction of meta‐cognition
- Divergent thinking and constructing episodic simulations
- Processes and Experiences of Creative Cognition in Seven Western Classical Composers
- Potential Originality and Effectiveness: The Dynamic Definition of Creativity
- Divergent Thinking as an Indicator of Creative Potential
- The topography of thought
- Measuring novelty in science with word embedding
- Adaptive Decision‐Making “Fast” and “Slow”: A Model of Creative Thinking
- AI-Based Speaking Assistant: Supporting Non-Native Speakers' Speaking in Real-Time Multilingual Communication
- Assessing the Effect of Cross-Domain Mapping on Creativity in Humans and Large Language Models
- Individuals with highly superior autobiographical memory do not show enhanced creative thinking
- Fertile Green
- Creativity and Mood Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
- Expertise as mental set: The effects of domain knowledge in creative problem solving
- Investigating the Effect of Mental Set on Insight Problem Solving
- From Walls to Windows: Using Barriers as Pathways to Insightful Solutions
- “The Penny Drops”: Investigating Insight Through the Medium of Cryptic Crosswords
- Measuring Creativity in the Age of Generative AI: Distinguishing Human and AI-Generated Creative Performance in Hiring and Talent Systems
- Large Language Models Align with the Human Brain during Creative Thinking
- Word Association and Creativity
- Creativity and the Homospatial Process
- Disentangling the Relationship Between Mindfulness and Creativity: The Role of Conceptual and Experimental Creative Methods
- Incubation, insight, and creative problem solving: A unified theory and a connectionist model.
- Where Models Converge and Humans Diverge: A Coverage Framework for Distributional Pluralism in Open-Ended Generation
- Coming to terms with failure: Private self-enhancement and public self-effacement
- Divergent consequences of success and failure in Japan and North America: An investigation of self-improving motivations and malleable selves.
- Cultural Differences in Self-Evaluation
- Insane, Poetic, Lovable: Creativity and Endorsement of the “Mad Genius” Stereotype
- Verbal creativity and schizotypal personality in relation to prefrontal hemispheric laterality: a behavioral and near-infrared optical imaging study. [europepmc]
- Aging and a benefit of distractibility. [europepmc]
- The origins of insight in resting-state brain activity. [europepmc]
- The creative brain: investigation of brain activity during creative problem solving by means of EEG and FMRI. [europepmc]
- Anodal transcranial direct current stimulation of the prefrontal cortex enhances complex verbal associative thought. [europepmc]
- Implicit affective cues and attentional tuning: an integrative review. [europepmc]
- Meditate to create: the impact of focused-attention and open-monitoring training on convergent and divergent thinking. [europepmc]
- Sleep-dependent memory triage: evolving generalization through selective processing. [europepmc]
- Rostral and caudal prefrontal contribution to creativity: a meta-analysis of functional imaging data. [europepmc]
- Creating metaphors: the neural basis of figurative language production. [europepmc]
- Revisiting Mednick's Model on Creativity-Related Differences in Associative Hierarchies. Evidence for a Common Path to Uncommon Thought. [europepmc]
- Assessment of Divergent Thinking by means of the Subjective Top-Scoring Method: Effects of the Number of Top-Ideas and Time-on-Task on Reliability and Validity. [europepmc]
- The time-course of EEG alpha power changes in creative ideation. [europepmc]
- Investigating the structure of semantic networks in low and high creative persons. [europepmc]
- Divergent thinking and constructing episodic simulations. [europepmc]
- A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies on divergent thinking using activation likelihood estimation. [europepmc]
- Creativity and Memory: Effects of an Episodic-Specificity Induction on Divergent Thinking. [europepmc]
- Efficient multitasking: parallel versus serial processing of multiple tasks. [europepmc]
- Insight solutions are correct more often than analytic solutions. [europepmc]
- Insight Is Not in the Problem: Investigating Insight in Problem Solving across Task Types. [europepmc]
- Creative constraints: Brain activity and network dynamics underlying semantic interference during idea production. [europepmc]
- Neural Mechanisms of Episodic Retrieval Support Divergent Creative Thinking. [europepmc]
- Exploring the effect of microdosing psychedelics on creativity in an open-label natural setting. [europepmc]
- Right temporal alpha oscillations as a neural mechanism for inhibiting obvious associations. [europepmc]
- Automating creativity assessment with SemDis: An open platform for computing semantic distance. [europepmc]
Related