Do creative people use shorter associative pathways?

In this study we investigate the relationship between individual differences in associative information processing and different facets of creativity. Associative information processing was measured by means of a slightly modified variant of Gianotti et al.’s (2001) word pair list, in which participants are shown indirectly related (e.g. cat – cheese) and unrelated word pairs (e.g. subject – marriage) and asked to generate a third word that could possibly serve as a connective associative link between the presented stimuli words. In contrast to Gianotti et al., we instructed our participants to judge the associative distance between the given problem words on a rating scale. This modified word pair list was administered along with a variety of psychometric creativity tasks in two different groups of university students who considerably differed with respect to their creativity-related demands in their fields of studies. We observed a weak but significant negative correlation between originality and the rated associative distance between the unrelated word pairs. In addition to this, the higher creative group estimated the distance between unrelated word pairs as being smaller than lower creative people. The results support Mednick’s (1962) theory of individual differences in associative hierarchies.