Creativity is not just ideation: Controlling stimulus ambiguity and inducing convergent thinking in the alternative uses task

In the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), a well-established creativity assessment, participants propose alternative uses for common items (e.g., a brick) within a 2-3-minute timeframe. While idea selection (convergent thinking) is involved, the emphasis is strongly on idea generation (divergent thinking). Here, we test the value of presenting a word overlapping an image compared to a word only prompt, and we introduce a novel cyclic procedure explicitly calling upon convergent thinking in the AUT. In Experiment 1, as compared to word only, word+image prompts increased idea fluency but reduced idea originality and variability within a group of native Polish speakers. Thus, word+image prompts improve AUT baselining. In Experiment 2, different participants produced as many ideas as possible within two minutes (List) or their single best idea at the end of each of three 30-second ideation cycles (Cycle). Although originality did not differ between List and Cycle overall, the first three ideas in List were rated as less creative than the ideas in Cycle, due to involvement of convergent thinking. Overall, we conclude that using disambiguating images reduces spurious interindividual variability in the AUT while introducing a convergent thinking component in the task allows us to assess creativity beyond ideation.