Distinguishing the roles of mental imagery and relational reasoning in creativity: a review and methodological proposal

The majority of research on creativity ignores the individual differences in fluency and originality scores of divergent thinking (DT) tasks, most commonly using their mean value. Nonetheless, studies also indicate the existence of distinct patterns of performance in these two variables, since some people can be very prolific in originality but have a low frequency of ideas, or fluency, of responses, and vice versa. Corroborating this hypothesis, research shows that these DT variables are modulated by two distinct cognitive mechanisms (mental imagery and relational reasoning) that also present significant variations between people, but its theoretical implications for creativity are still unknown. In this review, we present evidence from neuroscience and behavioral studies demonstrating that the distinct patterns of performance in DT tasks concerning fluency and originality described by other studies are probably a result of the different cognitive profiles that rise from the individual differences in mental imagery and relational reasoning capacities, suggesting the existence of two distinct subordinate categories of creative abilities (i.e. associative creativity and relational creativity). For last, we propose a new experimental paradigm for measuring these individual differences in the creative capacity using two perceptual inference tasks, each demanding distinct levels of associative and executive abilities.