Creative thinking is an extraordinary capacity of the human mind that is advancing culture, science, economy and alike. Despite a long history of research, there are still important questions that remain open: What are the facets of creative thinking? How can it be assessed?
Creative thinking is an extraordinary capacity of the human mind that is advancing culture, science, economy and alike. Despite a long history of research, there are still important questions that remain open: What are the facets of creative thinking? How can it be assessed?
This project investigates a newly developed online task for assessing creativity in which participants are asked to identify as many objects as possible in ambiguous images (the so-called pareidolia task). Responses are analysed using a novel approach based on their semantic distance from typical responses in a semantic vector space. This method aims to provide an objective measure of the originality of participants’ responses. We then examine how this measure relates to fantasy proneness, visual imagery ability, susceptibility to visual illusions, and everyday creativity. The project aims to improve our understanding of whether creative performance in the visual domain and creativity in everyday life are supported by common cognitive mechanisms.
