The common root of creativity-related preferences across domains

Poster Session D - Monday, April 15, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Gino BATTISTELLO¹ (gn.battistello@gmail.com), Sarah MORENO-RODRIGUEZ¹, Emmanuelle VOLLE¹, Alizée LOPEZ-PERSEM¹; ¹Paris Brain Institute (ICM), INSERM, CNRS, AP-HP, Sorbonne University

Decision-making is a daily practice for human beings, and creative decision-making is one of them. Studies on value-based decision-making have revealed that the brain valuation system exhibits consistency of value representation across various contexts. Previous research on creativity has proposed a breakdown of creative ideation into two main processes: a generative phase for spontaneous idea associations and an evaluative phase for monitoring these ideas. During the evaluation, ideas are judged based on their adequacy and originality, two defining dimensions of creativity. Recent findings integrate a valuation stage to the evaluation of ideas to monitor their assigned subjective value , computed based on their adequacy and originality. The aim of the current study is to ascertain the consistency of preferences across diverse creative domains. To achieve this, seventy-three participants engaged in free-generation tasks across three creativity domains: semantic associations, alternative uses, and drawings. Subsequently, they rated their responses based on likability (subjective value measurement) and perceived adequacy and originality. Participants tended to provide ideas more rapidly when they liked them more across all three domains. This emphasizes the motivational role of valuation in the creative process. Furthermore, across these domains, the likability of ideas seemed to stem from a combination of their adequacy and originality. Through computational modelling, we established that a similar non-linear value function, with consistent weighting and convexity parameters across domains, governed ideas’ judgments. These findings reflect both the inherent nature of the valuation process observed in value-based decisions and contribute to consolidating our understanding of creative ideation.

Topic Area: THINKING: Decision making