Schizophrenia patients perform as well as healthy controls on creative problem solving when fluid intelligence is accounted for

ABSTRACT

Introduction

This study examined creative problem solving in schizophrenia. We aimed to verify three hypotheses: (H1) schizophrenia patients differ from healthy controls in the accuracy of creative problem solving; (H2) schizophrenia patients are less effective at evaluating and rejecting incorrect associations and (H3) have a more idiosyncratic way of searching for semantic associations compared to controls.

Methods

Six Remote Associates Test (RAT) items and three insight problems were applied to schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. We compared groups on the overall accuracy in the tasks to verify H1 and developed a novel method of comparing the patterns of errors in the RAT to verify H2 and H3. We controlled for fluid intelligence to eliminate this significant source of variation, as typically creativity and intelligence are significantly related.

Results

Bayesian factor analysis did not support the group differences in either insight problems and RAT accuracy or the patterns of RAT errors.

Conclusions

The patients performed as well as the controls on both tasks. Analysis of RAT errors suggested that the process of searching for remote associations is comparable in both groups. It is highly improbable that individuals with schizophrenia benefit from their diagnosis during creative problem solving.

KEYWORDS:

• Schizophrenia
• creativity
• remote associations
• insight problem solving
• intelligence

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data are available at https://osf.io/tp7dh/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Narodowe Centrum Nauki: [Grant Number 2021/41/N/HS6/01620].