Divergent thinking and constructing future events: dissociating old from new ideas

ABSTRACT

Divergent thinking (the ability to generate creative ideas by combining diverse types of information) has been previously linked to the ability to imagine novel and specific future autobiographical events. Here, we examined whether divergent thinking is differentially associated with the ability to construct novel imagined future events and recast future events (i.e., actual past events recast as future events) as opposed to recalled past events. We also examined whether different types of creative ideas (i.e., old ideas from memory or new ideas from imagination) underlie the linkage between divergent thinking and various autobiographical events. Divergent thinking ability was measured using the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). In Experiment 1, the amount of episodic details for both novel and recast future events was associated with divergent thinking (AUT scores), and this relationship was significant with AUT scores for new creative ideas but not old creative ideas. There was no significant relationship between divergent thinking and the amount of episodic detail for recalled past events. We extended these findings in Experiment 2 to a different test of divergent thinking, the Consequences Task. These results demonstrate that individual differences in divergent thinking are associated with the capacity to both imagine and recast future events.

KEYWORDS:

• Episodic memory
• episodic simulation
• creativity
• individual differences
• future thinking

Acknowledgements

We thank Ethan Harris for assistance with data analysis and Aleea Devitt for statistical consultation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Disclosure of interest

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 Consistent with Addis et al. (2016), no significant correlations were observed between divergent thinking performance in the AUT and the number of external details generated for any task.

2 We directly compared the magnitude of the correlations as a function of old and new ideas for each task. The correlation values for old versus new ideas did not significantly differ for any task (i.e., compare each panel in Figure 3A to 3B; Zs < 1.17, ps > .24). In addition, the correlation values depicted in Figure 3B were not significantly different from one another (i.e., the correlation of new ideas and mean future internal details versus the correlation of new ideas with past internal details ideas; Z = 1.02, p = 0.31).

3 As in Experiment 1, no significant correlations were observed between divergent thinking performance in the Consequences Task and the number of external details generated for any task.

4 We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this interpretation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute on Aging R01 AG008441 to DLS. DRA is supported by the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program.