Re-examining prominent measures of divergent and convergent creativity

Much of creativity research has focused on the constructs of divergent and convergent thinking. In this review, we address key gaps in extant empirical understanding of these constructs and offer suggestions for future research to parse their respective contributions to creative cognition. Furthermore, we consider the construct validity of the psychometric tasks most commonly used to measure these types of thinking: The Alternative Uses Task and the Remote Associates Test. We underscore that, although these tasks frequently are used to assay these constructs separately, they actually involve mixtures of the two constructs together. We conclude that additional measurement development and factor analytic research is necessary to delineate the separability and interdependence of divergent and convergent thinking as components of creativity.