Adam E. Green’s research while affiliated with Georgetown University and other places

Creative thinking is a primary driver of innovation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), allowing students and practitioners to generate novel hypotheses, flexibly connect information from diverse sources, and solve ill-defined problems. To foster creativity in STEM education, there is a crucial need for assessment tools for measuring STEM creativity that educators and researchers can apply to test how different teaching approaches impact scientific creativity in undergraduate education. In this work, we introduce the Scientific Creative Thinking Test (SCTT). The SCTT includes three subtests that assess cognitive skills important for STEM creativity: generating hypotheses, research questions, and experimental designs. In five studies with young adults, we demonstrate the reliability and validity of the SCTT—including test-retest reliability and convergent validity with measures of creativity and academic achievement—as well as measurement invariance across race/ethnicity and gender. In addition, we present a method for automatically scoring SCTT responses, training the large language model Llama 2 to produce originality scores that closely align with human ratings—demonstrating STEM-specific, automated creativity assessment for the first time. The full SCTT, along with the code to automatically score it, are available on a repository in the Open Science Framework.

The world faces formidable challenges that demand creative solutions tailored to specific socio-cultural contexts. We introduce thematic profile analysis, a computational method that combines topic modeling with large language models to situate creative ideas within context-dependent and culturally specific semantic spaces. A thematic profile quantifies the semantic distance between an individual’s creative ideas and themes from a corpus. Analyzing 18,414 ideas from 3,213 participants across 74 nationalities, we found that an individual’s thematic profile strongly predicted human creativity ratings (R = .58-.79). Thematic content was critical to creativity, with certain themes being more important to avoid or explore in one culture (e.g., Mexican) than another (e.g., U.S.A.). Thematic profile analysis enabled novel quantitative comparisons of themes across cultures - revealing substantial differences and similarities – providing a robust tool for capturing the context-dependency and cultural specificity of creativity.

Novelty and appropriateness are two fundamental components of creativity. However, the way in which novelty and appropriateness are separated at behavioral and neural levels remains poorly understood. In the present study, we aim to distinguish behavioral and neural bases of novelty and appropriateness of creative idea generation. In alignment with two established theories of creative thinking, which respectively, emphasize semantic association and executive control, behavioral results indicate that novelty relies more on associative abilities, while appropriateness relies more on executive functions. Next, employing a connectome predictive modeling (CPM) approach in resting-state fMRI data, we define two functional network-based models—dominated by interactions within the default network and by interactions within the limbic network—that respectively, predict novelty and appropriateness (i.e., cross-brain prediction). Furthermore, the generalizability and specificity of the two functional connectivity patterns are verified in additional resting-state fMRI and task fMRI. Finally, the two functional connectivity patterns, respectively mediate the relationship between semantic association/executive control and novelty/appropriateness. These findings provide global and predictive distinctions between novelty and appropriateness in creative idea generation.

In this chapter, we outline three ways to try to prevent potentially transformational creators from giving up on being creative. The first is to tackle misperceptions and biases that people have about creativity as a construct that could prevent them from identifying as a creative person. The second is to help people grow as creators by building insight and understanding that can help them develop their strengths, note potential resources, and overcome possible hurdles. The third way is to spread recognition that not only is the social domain just as valid as artistic or scientific domains but also that it relies on certain types of creative thinking that may be particularly useful for transformative creative actions. Throughout and in our conclusion, we discuss ways in which the creators who might be inspired by these efforts may be more likely to gravitate toward transformational creativity.

Women reliably perform worse than men on measures of spatial ability, particularly those involving mental rotation. At the same time, females also report higher levels of spatial anxiety than males. What remains unclear, however, is whether and in what ways gender differences in these cognitive and affective aspects of spatial processing may be interrelated. Here, we tested for robust gender differences across six different datasets in spatial ability and spatial anxiety (N = 1257, 830 females). Further, we tested for bidirectional mediation effects. We identified indirect relations between gender and spatial skills through spatial anxiety, as well as between gender and spatial anxiety through spatial skills. In the gender → spatial anxiety → spatial ability direction, spatial anxiety explained an average of 22.4% of gender differences in spatial ability. In the gender → spatial ability → spatial anxiety direction, spatial ability explained an average of 25.9% of gender differences in spatial anxiety. Broadly, these results support a strong relation between cognitive and affective factors when explaining gender differences in the spatial domain. However, the nature of this relation may be more complex than has been assumed in previous literature. On a practical level, the results of this study caution the development of interventions to address gender differences in spatial processing which focus primarily on either spatial anxiety or spatial ability until such further research can be conducted. Our results also speak to the need for future longitudinal work to determine the precise mechanisms linking cognitive and affective factors in spatial processing.

Novelty and appropriateness are two fundamental components of creativity. However, the way in which novelty and appropriateness are separated at behavioral and neural levels remains poorly understood. In the present study we aimed to distinguish behavioral and neural bases of novelty and appropriateness of creative idea generation. In alignment with two established theories of creative thinking, which respectively emphasize semantic association and executive control, behavioral results (n = 1,519) indicated that novelty was supported by associative ability, while appropriateness was supported by executive function. Next, employing a connectome predictive modeling (CPM) approach in resting-state fMRI data (n = 1,455), we defined two functional network-based models—dominated by interactions within default network (DMN) and by interactions within limbic network (LIM)—that respectively predicted novelty and appropriateness (i.e., cross-brain prediction). Furthermore, the generalizability and specificity of the two functional connectivity patterns were verified in additional resting-state fMRI and task-fMRI. Finally, the two functional connectivity patterns respectively mediated the relationship between semantic association/executive control and Novelty/appropriateness. These findings provide global and predictive distinctions between novelty and appropriateness in creative idea generation.

The “standard” definition of creativity as novel and useful describes creative products, but creativity is constituted by processes. This misalignment contributes to the oft-noted challenges of operationalizing creativity. Here, we distinguish creativity as a process from creativity as an attribute (i.e. “creative-ness”). Operating from a priori premises of creativity theory, we develop a process definition of creativity. Specifically, creativity is defined as internal attention constrained by a generative goal. This definition comprises three criteria: 1) attention is directed internally (toward mental representations); 2) attentional operations (e.g. search, manipulation) are constrained to fit parameters of a to-be-achieved goal state (whether or not a goal is actually achieved); and 3) the goal state is generative (not already precisely held in memory). We illustrate how these three definitional process elements align with insights yielded by creativity neuroscience, clarify ontological distinctions (e.g. from mind-wandering and retrieval), and relate the process definition to process-based models. The process definition provides minimal necessity and sufficiency criteria for whether a process should be considered creativity, but does not exclude the many other perceptual, emotional, etc. elements that can contribute to creativity processes. Researchers should specify whether they are studying creativity-as-process vs. “creative-ness,” and consider including process-focused assessments.

Identifying ways to enable people to reach their creative potential is a core goal of creativity research with implications for education and professional attainment. Recently, we identified a potential barrier to creative achievement: creativity anxiety (i.e., anxiety specific to creative thinking). Initial work found that creativity anxiety is associated with fewer real-world creative achievements. However, the more proximal impacts of creativity anxiety remain unexplored. In particular, understanding how to overcome creativity anxiety requires understanding how creativity anxiety may or may not impact creative cognitive performance, and how it may relate to state-level anxiety and effort while completing creative tasks. The present study sought to address this gap by measuring creativity anxiety alongside several measures of creative performance, while concurrently surveying state-level anxiety and effort. Results indicated that creativity anxiety was, indeed, predictive of poor creative performance, but only on some of the tasks included. We also found that creativity anxiety predicted both state anxiety and effort during creative performance. Interestingly, state anxiety and effort did not explain the associations between creativity anxiety and creative performance. Together, this work suggests that creativity anxiety can often be overcome in the performance of creative tasks, but likewise points to increased state anxiety and effort as factors that may make creative performance and achievement fragile in more demanding real-world contexts.

Creative thinking is important for success in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Yet creativity in STEM is perhaps the most under-researched question in the creativity literature, with little known about the neurocognitive mechanisms supporting scientific creative thinking abilities, such as hypothesis generation. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, undergraduate STEM majors (n = 47) completed a scientific hypothesis generation task (thinking of novel/plausible explanations for hypothetical scenarios) and a control task (thinking of synonyms to replace a word in a hypothetical scenario). Multivariate pattern analysis identified a whole-brain network supporting hypothesis generation, including hubs of the default (posterior cingulate cortex [PCC]), salience (right anterior insula [AI]), and semantic control (left inferior frontal gyrus [IFG]) networks. Using these network hubs as seed regions, we found increased between-network functional connectivity during hypothesis generation, including stronger coupling between semantic control (IFG) and posterior default regions (PCC and bilateral angular gyrus) and stronger coupling between salience (AI) and default regions, alongside weaker within-network functional connectivity. Our results indicate that scientific creative thinking involves increased cooperation among the default, salience, and control networks—similar to creative thinking in other domains—potentially reflecting a coordination of spontaneous/generative and controlled/evaluative processes to construct original explanations for scientific phenomena.