What inspires us? An experimental analysis of the semantic meaning of irrelevant information in creative ideation

Abstract

Past research showed that apparently irrelevant information for a creative task at hand can lead to higher creative performance, especially in open-minded individuals. Through two diverse experimental procedures, the present work investigated which type of irrelevance information can inspire (i.e., increase) the creative performance during a divergent thinking (DT) task and how open-minded individuals can be inspired by this kind of information. In Experiment 1, the attentional processing of information that was either apparently relevant or irrelevant for the execution of a verbal DT task was assessed by means of an eye-tracking methodology. In Experiment 2, creative performance was explored through a verbal priming paradigm, which forcedly introduced apparently irrelevant information during the DT task. In both experiments, the level of irrelevance was operationalized in terms of semantic distance between the different kind of information. Results from both experiments highlighted the role of the semantic meaning of the irrelevant information as one of the main determinants, along with Openness, of inspiration (i.e., enhancement) of the creative performance.

Keywords:

• Inspiration
• creativity
• attention
• semantic distance
• divergent thinking
• originality
• statistical infrequency
• Openness

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to all participants who took part in the two experiments, to Wendy Ross for her valuable comments and suggestions, and to Mara Lever for her help in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Before proceeding to the description of the analysis, we will describe the terminology that will be used throughout the article. The notion of “semantic distance” follows the label adopted by previous studies that have estimated the measures and statistics on semantic distance at the concept level (Kenett et al., 2017; Montefinese et al., 2013). Semantic distance will be also conceived as the degree of similarity between concepts (i.e., the closer that two concepts are, the more similar their semantic representations).