The Role of Memory in Originality

Abstract

The research concerned the application of experimental methods to the study of a cognitive ability. Creativity is normally measured by production and one assumes that information in memory influences the occurrence of original ideas and solutions. Experiment 1 indicated that those performing better on standard measures of creativity had no better gross memory abilities than others---they did not recall usual or unusual words more accurately. The production of unusual words however, was shown to relate to creativity. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed these findings adding evidence concerning the positive relation of originality and vocabulary. This latter demands access to semantic features in memory.

The final three experiments considered aspects of this problem of access. Experiment 4 examined whether ability to use different cues or codes (visual, acoustic and semantic) was complementary to originality. No relation was found but insight was gained into factors in the memory base whereby one generates more words given a semantic code, though more words are available given a visual code. A model of "distance"? was proposed: items are generated according to their distance from a starting point, in conjunction with their activity level or familiarity to the subject. Experiment 3 examined naming latency for recognition of words, given code information. A significant effect of code, semantic faster than acoustic faster than visual, 2was found, supporting the model, while word frequency, a crude measure of familiarity, was also significant. Experiment 6 showed that the effects were not due to the codes themselves but could be realistically located in the memory base.

The usefulness of the model was discussed and it was applied to the results of the earlier experiments. The final conclusions were that the extent or frequency of the search determines the output and that creative individuals utilise the search process to a greater extent.