Creativity and the Experience of Duration

Summary

This study investigated the relationship between the Remote Associates Test (RAT) of creativity and duration experience. Ss were 176 Introductory Psychology students—100 female and 76 male. A 2 × 2 x 2 independent groups design was used with individuals of high and low creative ability, creative and uncreative tasks, and 10- and 20-minute actual-time durations. An analysis of covariance was performed on the duration estimates of the actual times with enjoyment scores and attempted accuracy scores as the covariates. It was found that highly creative Ss, identified by high scores on the RAT, estimated an interval of creative activity (performance on the RAT) as longer than did Ss with low RAT scores (p < .001), and that they also estimated an interval of creative activity as longer than a corresponding interval for an uncreative task, adding numbers (p < .002). To the extent that the high creatives generate a greater number and remoteness of associations, the present findings are interpreted as being consistent with Ornstein's theory that as storage size expands, the experience of temporal duration is lengthened.