T. B. Ward (1994) investigated creativity by asking participants to draw alien creatures that they imagined to be from a planet very different from Earth. He found that participant drawings reliably contained features typical of common Earth animals. As a consequence, Ward concluded that creativity is structured. The present investigation predicts…

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to analyze the effects of both personality and environmental variables on the imagination of video/film major university students; and (2) to test the mediator effect resulting from the variable of social climate. The results of this study supported both indicators of imaginative capabilities and…

Creativity is an important component of human intelligence, and imbuing artificially intelligent systems with creativity is an interesting challenge. In particular, it is difficult to quantify (or even qualify) creativity. Recently, it has been suggested that conditions for attributing creativity to a system include: appreciation, imagination, and…

Theories of categorization need to account for ways in which people use their creativity to categorize things, especially in the context of similarity. The current three-phase study is a preliminary attempt to understand how people group concepts together as well as to explore the role of similarity between concepts in creative categorization.…

Individual differences in creativity across the lifespan have been identified, but little research has focused on the development of creativity during early adolescence. This project examined individual differences on two measures of creativity in early adolescence as well as the predictability of adolescent creativity from pretend play behaviors…

This study continues the effort to investigate the possible influence of bilingualism on an individual's creative potential. The performances of Farsi-English bilinguals living in the UAE and Farsi monolinguals living in Iran were compared on the Culture Fair Intelligence Test battery and two creativity tests: divergent thinking test (the…

This repeated measures study examined second graders' (n = 21) performance in creating inventions related to animal adaptations for simple products under two conditions that alternated each week for a six-week period. In the analogy condition, students used form and function analogy object boxes to learn about animal adaptations, applying these…

Teachers' conceptions of creativity and creative students were investigated. Questionnaires were administered to elementary school teachers to examine their attitudes, beliefs, and current classroom practices. Teachers were found to possess inaccurate concepts regarding what constitutes creativity and revealed conflicts with the classroom…

This study focuses on behavior associated with young art students' developing artistic talent ("skills and art-making behavior") and creativity ("personal expressions of visual information"). The study examines the role of personal expertise in a student's development of problem finding, domain-specific technical skill, perseverance, evaluation,…

Undergraduates studied nonword exemplars and then created their own novel nonwords. In Experiment 1, people studied legal or illegal nonwords. In Experiment 2, people studied illegal nonwords, but to increase awareness of the features, half of the participants assessed the features of the nonwords. Despite instructions to avoid copying any aspect…

Responding to a definition of creativity, 449 Chinese language teachers identified imagination foremost, followed by inspiration and original ideas as a component of effective writing. Teachers identified developing student confidence and providing an open atmosphere as essential means of fostering creativity. The majority of teachers, however,…

A study examined the relationship between structured imagination and creativity in story writing among 108 undergraduates. Subjects produced paragraphs that were meaningful/original, meaningful/non-original, or non-meaningful/non-original. Results showed that groups 1 and 2 wrote psychologically meaningful stories significantly more than group 3…

This study examined the impact of three conditions on how subjects (105 college students) generated ideas about imaginary extraterrestrials. Results are discussed in terms of constraints on innovation, ways of overcoming those constraints, and the general tendency for new ideas to preserve many of the central properties of existing concepts.…

Two studies involving 60 graduate and undergraduate students explored the role of structured imagination in story creation. Results indicate representational knowledge was an important influence on story meaning and originality and that meaningful and original stories were more likely to contain abstract concepts than were nonmeaningful and…

This paper views creativity as the combination of the conditions of interaction and transformation-imagination-fantasy. These conditions operate together, simultaneously, in order to define the complex process of creativity. (DB)