Does Episodic Retrieval Contribute to Creative Writing? An Exploratory Study

ABSTRACT

Previous research indicates that episodic retrieval contributes to divergent creative thinking. However, this research has relied on standard laboratory tests of divergent creative thinking, such as generating creative uses for objects; it is unknown whether episodic retrieval also contributes to domain-specific forms of creativity. Here we start to explore whether episodic retrieval contributes to content generation on one such domain-specific task: creative writing. In two experiments, we use an episodic specificity induction (ESI) that selectively impacts tasks that draw on episodic retrieval. If episodic retrieval contributes to content generation during creative writing, then ESI should selectively increase the number of episodic details that people subsequently generate on a creative writing task. In our first experiment, we found evidence that ESI increased the number of episodic details participants generated. We observed a similar, though non-significant, trend in the second experiment. These findings constitute a starting point for examining the contribution of episodic retrieval to creative writing, but additional studies will be needed to more definitively characterize the nature and extent of these contributions.

Acknowledgments

We thank Andrew Rao for his help in data collection. We also thank Andrew Rao and Ethan Harris for their help with scoring. We want to thank Helen Jing for her guidance on how to score the responses. This research was funded by the National Institute on Aging Grant R01 AG008441 awarded to DLS. R.E.B. is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation [DRL-1920653]. KPM is supported by the National Institute on Aging Grant F32 AG059341.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute on Aging [AG008441]; National Institute on Aging [AG059341]; National Science Foundation [DRL-1920653].