SHORTCUTS IN SEMANTIC MEMORY ACCOUNT FOR THE CREATIVITY-FLUENCY CONFOUND

Creative ideas arise from the retrieval and combination of concepts stored in memory. Yet, the cognitive bases underlying this memory search remain unclear, especially in the context of creative thinking. A series of studies reported that, during idea-generation tasks, participants’ idea fluency correlated with their creativity. Correction methods have been developed, but cannot fully disambiguate creativity from fluency, leaving a creativity-fluency confound in the scientific study of creative thinking.
The current study tests the novel hypothesis that the creativity-fluency link may be rooted in the organization of semantic memory, which has been related to creativity via computational semantic network methods.
Ninety French-speaking individuals completed 49 trials of an associative fluency task based on polysemous cue words (PolyFT). We classified the responses according to their semantic (clustering or switching) and temporal (fast or slow) dynamics, resulting in four response types. Switching [clustering] indicates a response with a different [same] meaning than the previous one. Participants completed a relatedness judgment task to estimate individual semantic memory networks and their properties, and a creativity battery.
Using Spearman’s rank correlation and structural equation modeling, we uncovered the specific role of Fast Switching in the fluency-creativity confound. Fast Switching was linked to reduced network modularity (less segregated networks), drove covariation between fluency and creativity, and accounted for correlations among creativity assessments. These results suggest that Fast Switching reflects “shortcuts” in semantic memory, facilitating both fluency and creativity.
These findings provide a mechanistic account of the fluency-creativity confound, grounded in the structure of semantic memory.