What drives us to search for creative ideas and why does it feel good to find one? While previous studies demonstrated the positive influence of intrinsic motivation on creative abilities, how reward and subjective values play a role in creative mechanisms remains unknown. The existing framework for creativity investigation distinguishes generation and evaluation phases, and mostly aligns evaluation to cognitive control processes, without clarifying the mechanisms involved. This study proposes a new framework for creativity by 1) characterizing the role of individual preferences (how people value ideas) in creative ideation and 2) providing a computational model that implements three types of operations required for creative idea generation: knowledge exploration, candidate ideas valuation (attributing subjective values), and response selection. The findings first provide behavioral evidence demonstrating the involvement of valuation processes during idea generation: preferred ideas are provided faster. Second, valuation depends on the adequacy and originality of ideas and determines which ideas are selected. Finally, the proposed computational model correctly predicts the speed and quality of human creative responses, as well as interindividual differences in creative abilities. Altogether, this unprecedented model introduces the mechanistic role of valuation in creativity. It paves the way for a neurocomputational account of creativity mechanisms.

What drives us to search for creative ideas, and why does it feel good to find one? While previous studies demonstrated the positive influence of motivation on creative abilities, how reward and subjective values play a role in creativity remains unknown. This study proposes to characterize the role of individual preferences (how people value ideas) in creative ideation via behavioral experiments and computational modeling. Using the Free Generation of Associates Task coupled with rating tasks, we demonstrate the involvement of valuation processes during idea generation: Preferred ideas are provided faster. We found that valuation depends on the adequacy and originality of ideas and guides response selection and creativity. Finally, our computational model correctly predicts the speed and quality of human creative responses, as well as interindividual differences in creative abilities. Altogether, this model introduces the mechanistic role of valuation in creativity. It paves the way for a neurocomputational account of creativity mechanisms.