COVID-19 took us by surprise. We all had to face the lockdown and pandemic that put us in a new context, changing our way of life, work conditions, and habits. Coping with such an unprecedented situation may have stimulated creativity. However, the situation also restricted our liberties and triggered health or psychological difficulties. We carried out an online survey (n = 380) to examine whether and how the COVID-19 related first lockdown period was associated with creativity changes in French speaking population. Despite a global negative subjective experience of the situation, participants reported that they were more creative during the lockdown than before. Positive changes were linked with more time availability, more motivation, or the need to solve a problem while negative changes were related to negative affective feelings or a lack of resources or opportunities. This study documents the effects of the first lockdown period on creativity and the factors that influenced it.

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.