Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study we investigate semantic retrieval strategies in order to inform discussions about cognitive mechanisms underlying divergent thinking and creativity. Relying on a verbal fluency task, we map the particular associative strategies participants engage and how they predict their performance. The study starts from the assumption that during divergent thinking processes, participants move along a path through a semantic space, and that each step is prompted by an associative strategy taking them from one word to the next. There are, however, a number of such strategies, and we predict that the outcome of the process is contingent on participants’ engagement of and shift between strategies. The study consists of a two-part elicitation paradigm where participants first conduct a verbal fluency task and then are guided through a meta-cognitive retrieval process to individuate the strategies employed in the task. We report significant correlations between the engagement of associative strategies and outcome measures of divergent thinking in terms of originality, flexibility and fluency.