Eric Evan Chen’s research while affiliated with University of California, Irvine and other places

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Publications (2)


Clarifying What Forward Flow Is (and Isn’t): Reply to
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July 2020

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86 Reads

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7 Citations

American Psychologist

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Stephen Anderson

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Eric Chen

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Forward flow is a new measure that quantifies free thought and predicts creativity (Gray et al., 2019). In his comment, Rossiter (2020) raises some conceptual and measurement concerns about this measure. We believe these concerns are specious, resting on fundamental misunderstandings about our aim and approach. This reply clarifies the nature of forward flow and dispels these concerns.

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Figure 1: Thought plot comparing two participants from Study 1. The responses of S 147 (blue) on divergent thinking tasks were rated as more creative than those of S 71 (green).
Figure 2. Average forward flow and rated creativity on divergent thinking tasks, by sample and study (Studies 1-5).
Figure 3: Forward flow and ratings of creativity in divergent thinking tasks across all participants in Studies 1-5 (N = 1395)
Figure 4: Forward flow across a sample of tweets from Ariana Grande (red) and the Dalai Lama (blue). The higher flow of Grande reflects greater semantic evolution across posts.
“Forward Flow”: A New Measure to Quantify Free Thought and Predict Creativity

January 2019

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5,611 Reads

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145 Citations

American Psychologist

When the human mind is free to roam, its subjective experience is characterized by a continuously evolving stream of thought. Although there is a technique that captures people’s streams of free thought—free association—its utility for scientific research is undermined by two open questions: 1) How can streams of thought be quantified? and 2) Do such streams predict psychological phenomena? We resolve the first issue—quantification—by presenting a new metric, “forward flow,” that uses latent semantic analysis (LSA) to capture the semantic evolution of thoughts over time (i.e., how much present thoughts diverge from past thoughts). We resolve the second issue—prediction—by examining whether forward flow predicts creativity in the lab and the real-world. Our studies reveal that forward flow predicts creativity in college students (Study 1) and a representative sample of Americans (Study 2), even when controlling for intelligence. Studies also reveal that membership in real-world creative groups—performance majors (Study 3), professional actors (Study 4) and entrepreneurs (Study 5)—is predicted by forward flow, even when controlling for performance on divergent thinking tasks. Study 6 reveals that forward flow in celebrities’ social media posts (i.e., on Twitter) predicts their creative achievement. In addition to creativity, forward flow may also help predict mental illness, emotional experience, leadership ability, adaptability, neural dynamics, group productivity, and cultural success. We present open-access online tools at www.forwardflow.org for assessing and visualizing forward flow for both illustrative and large-scale data analytic purposes.

Citations (2)


... Forward flow (FF) is a recently introduced measure that assesses how much the semantic content of people's thought changes over time (K. Gray et al., 2019;Kenett et al., 2020). FF should not be confused with the more well-known concept of flow (Cziksentmihalyi, 2008), which refers to a certain state of mind. ...

Reference:

Schizotypy and Creativity: Divergent Thinking, Inhibitory Control, and the Spontaneous Flow of Thought
Clarifying What Forward Flow Is (and Isn’t): Reply to

American Psychologist

... This work explores possible convergence in the creative outputs of large-scale LLMs. We test this by soliciting creative outputs from LLMs and humans using standardized creativity tests-the Alternative Uses Task [23], Forward Flow [22], and the Divergent Association Task [38]-and measuring the population-level variability of responses. While caution should be used in extrapolating human-centric psychological tests to non-human entities (see §3), these tests are useful in our setting because of their standardized output format. ...

“Forward Flow”: A New Measure to Quantify Free Thought and Predict Creativity

American Psychologist