Novice designers produced a sequence of sketches while inventing a logo for a novel brand of soft drink. The sketches were scored for the presence of specific objects, their local features and global composition. Self-assessment scores for each sketch and art critics' scores for the end products were collected. It was investigated whether the design evolves in an essentially random fashion or according to an overall heuristic. The results indicated a macrostructure in the evolution of the design, characterized by two stages. For the majority of participants, the first stage is marked by the introduction and modification of novel objects and their local and global aspects; the second stage is characterized by changes in their global composition. The minority that showed the better designs has a different strategy, in which most global changes were made in the beginning. Although participants did not consciously apply these strategies, their self-assessment scores reflect the stages of the process.

We recently proposed the Creative Reasoning Test (CRT), a test for reasoning in ill-defined problem spaces. The test asks children who first performed the Standard Progressive Matrices test (SPM) to next generate an SPM-style test item themselves. The item is scored based on different aspects of its complexity. Here we introduce a method to provide separate sub scores for convergent and divergent production. A sample of 205 children from Grades 1 to 4 performed in both SPM and CRT, followed by a standard creativity test, the Test of Creative ThinkingDrawing Production (TCT-DP). We considered developmental aspects of the CRT scores as well as how they relate to classical reasoning and creativity test scores. Whereas the convergent production sub score of the CRT correlated with the SPM, the divergent production sub score correlated with the TCT-DP and no correlation was observed between both sub scores of the CRT. We concluded that convergent and divergent abilities in creative production can be assessed independently, within the same knowledge domain as classical problem solving.

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This paper discusses the importance of three features of psychometric tests for cognition research: construct definition, problem space, and knowledge domain. Definition of constructs, e.g., intelligence or creativity, forms the theoretical basis for test construction. Problem space, being well or ill-defined, is determined by the cognitive abilities considered to belong to the constructs, e.g., convergent thinking to intelligence, divergent thinking to creativity. Knowledge domain and the possibilities it offers cognition are reflected in test results. We argue that (a) comparing results of tests with different problem spaces is more informative when cognition operates in both tests on an identical knowledge domain, and (b) intertwining of abilities related to both constructs can only be expected in tests developed to instigate such a process. Test features should guarantee that abilities can contribute to self-generated and goal-directed processes bringing forth solutions that are both new and applicable. We propose and discuss a test example that was developed to address these issues.