Beyond Openness: A Variety of Creative Experiences Increases Flexibility and Originality of Visuospatial Divergent Thinking

Despite strong empirical evidence linking openness to experience and creative ideation, exactly how openness is associated with the generation of novel ideas is unclear. Additionally, although many studies examine verbally-prompted divergent thinking, less attention has been devoted to creative idea generation in response to perceptual or visuospatial stimuli. The current study assesses if individuals’ voluntary engagement in a wider range of creativity-related activities contributes to flexible and original idea generation on less-often explored perceptually-based divergent thinking tasks, and if more varied experience provides incremental predictive value for flexibility and originality beyond what is predicted by openness. The study further newly compares human-based ratings of flexibility and originality with automated computational assessment of the semantic distance between participants’ responses (“SemDis”) for two perceptually-based stimulus sets. Hierarchical linear regression analyses of the responses of 132 young adults revealed that variety of creative activities was significantly predictive of idea flexibility and originality, over-and-above the contribution of openness. For both stimulus sets, SemDis was strongly positively correlated with human-rated flexibility and originality, demonstrating the applicability of this automated measure to perceptually-prompted divergent-thinking tasks. The findings underscore the value of both openness and providing opportunities for engaging in varied creativity-related activities for fueling innovative thinking.