How subjective idea valuation energizes and guides creative idea generation.

Abstract

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.

The human reward system encodes the subjective value of ideas during creative thinking

“…This finding replicates Lopez-Persem et al (19) and suggests, together with other studies, that the evaluation step is essential in the creative process. For instance, previous results showed that an overly stringent evaluation inhibited creativity (26,71).…”

“…The present study not only shows that individuals combine the dimensions of originality and adequacy into a subjective value, but it also demonstrates that the way they combine them (as estimated by the α and δ parameters of the CES model) relates to their creative abilities: giving more weight to an idea's originality over its adequacy (i.e., having a high α) and preferring a trade-off of these two dimensions rather than an extreme of either (i.e., having a low δ) correlated with higher scores in creativity tests. This finding replicates Lopez-Persem et al (19) and suggests, together with other studies, that the evaluation step is essential in the creative process. For instance, previous results showed that an overly stringent evaluation inhibited creativity (26,71).…”

“…In parallel, to delve deeper into the decision-making processes of creativity, it would be helpful to investigate the selection step of creativity, i.e., how individuals choose the best candidate idea. Like monetary or food choices, creative choices are likely driven by subjective values, as Lopez-Persem et al (19) suggested. This also paves the way for investigating suboptimal or biased choices, which are a central issue considering the growing literature on cognitive biases in creativity research (71,74,75).…”

“…We fitted the participants' data at the individual level with the Constant Elasticity of Substitution utility function (50,51), which provided the best fit in our previous study using the same experimental design (19):…”

“…In this study, we conceptualize the evaluation step of creativity as a specific case of decision-making: similar to food options in dietary choices, creative options are compared, and the most satisfactory one is selected (18,19). We hypothesize that creative evaluation involves individual preferences and decision-making computations that methods from neuroeconomics can enable us to study.…”