Two experiments are reported which examine the role of imagery in anagram solving. In Experiment I 5s attempted 12 anagrams constructed from nouns of high or low imagery value, with either no information, structural information, or semantic information as aids to solution. All words had a Thorndike-Lorge frequency value of 20 or more words per million, and other variables known to influence anagram solution time were controlled (word length, number of possible solutions, frequency of successive letter pairs, and letter order). High imagery words were found significantly faster than low imagery words. Both structural and semantic clues facilitated performance, but structural information had a greater effect on the solution of low imagery words and semantic information had more effect on high imagery words. It was suggested that this might reflect the use of either letter manipulation or word production strategies under the different clue conditions. In Experiment II the main effect of imagery was replicated with different word lists and additional controls. The imagery effect was again highly significant and clearly independent of word frequency and associative meaningfulness.

Summary. Four tests from the Minnesota Tests of Creative Thinking (two verbal and two non‐verbal) were administered to 394 Grade 7A children from 10 metropolitan schools in Perth, Western Australia. All tests were scored for fluency (number of responses) and originality (infrequent responses). Data were also collected relating to five measures of creative performance in real‐life situations, within and outside the classroom. Test‐retest reliability for the tests of creative thinking were consistently higher for non‐verbal than verbal tests, and for fluency than originality. A highly significant relationship was found between scores on the tests of creative thinking and the measures of creative performance. It was not assumed that the performance measures would be related to each other (creativity in one sphere does not imply creativity in another) but a moderate amount of generality was, in fact, found. In most cases the average correlations between measures were between 0·150 and 0·350 (N = 394). The teacher and peer ratings of creativity in school were clearly related, as were the two questionnaires concerned with leisure activities. Imaginative writing was related to both in‐school and out‐of‐school measures. The correlation between the total creative thinking score and IQ on the ACER Intermediate Test D was 0·143 (p<·05). Within the high‐creative thinking group (the top 20 per cent on the tests) differences in performance were not related to intelligence. No sex differences were observed with regard to either test scores or creative performance.

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Thirl}' anagram problems were given lo 91 undergraduate subjects, drawn from the upper and lower 25%, on verbal and nonverbal fluency tests, of a first-year psychology population. Following the experimental procedure described by Mendelsohn and Griswold, immediately before the anagram task, subjects learned a 25word list, while another list was played on a tape recorder. Ten of the anagram solutions appeared in the memorized list (focal incidental cues) and 10 in the interference list (peripheral incidental cues). High scorers on the nonverbal fluency tests made significantly more use of the focal cues than low scorers. High scorers on the verbal tests also utilized more focal incidental cues than low scorers, but the difference between groups was not significant. Neither high nor low scorers utilized the peripheral cues. There was no difference between high and low groups in rote recall of the memorized list. The results provide at least partial support for a relationship between attention deployment and one important aspect of creativity, and indicate that the Mendelsohn findings of greater use of incidental verbal cues by high Remote Associates Test scorers was not a result of their higher vocabulary level.

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