The evidence described so far, from both inside and outside of the laboratory, points to a complex and nuanced relationship between creativity and mental imagery. Researchers in this field have developed a number of methods of investigating mental imagery in relation to creativity, including employing measures of divergent thinking, self-report measures and creative imagery tasks, and these are outlined below.
1.3.1 Investigating creative imagery
An increasingly common approach to the investigation of mental imagery and its links to creativity in laboratory conditions is the image generation approach (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992, Finke, 1996; Finke & Slayton, 1988). This looks at the emergence of creativity through visualisation and mental synthesis of (usually) geometric and alphanumerical shapes and lines or 3D objects such as brackets, wheels or bowls. Finke
and his colleagues (1992) popularised the creative cognition approach to creativity, demonstrating that particular mental processes and conceptual structures often guide creative pursuits. Creative cognition is defined as the ability to create original, novel and useful products in the absence of concurrent stimuli, that is, the shapes are imagined rather than being present in front of them. The mental synthesis task (Finke, Pinker & Farah, 1989) and its subsequent variants were developed by Finke and Slayton (1988; Finke, 1990) and requires participants to combine and manipulate common geometric forms to create something new, sometimes according to pre-defined object categories. These images can then be rated for creativity, correspondence (how much the image produced looks like what the respondent intended it to look like), and appropriateness (whether any of the shapes have been altered or changed). Finke, Ward and Smith‟s (1992) Geneplore model consists of discrete „generative‟ and „exploratory‟ phases, two distinct processes making up creative cognition, and demonstrates how participants are able to produce unique, elaborate and previously unanticipated inventions and creations through „mental synthesis‟ (combining forms in imagery), and „restructuring‟ (separating and then recombining shapes in imagery), in a cyclical „combinational play‟ of mental images (Finke & Slayton, 1988). Creative products generated through these methodologies can also be scored on the basis of a number of additional dimensions relevant to creativity and its measurement, namely originality/novelty, where points are awarded on a scale from 1 being „very poor originality‟ to 5 „very high originality‟, with the same scale being used for the practicality/usefulness ratings. In studies employing
only afterwards to allocate their image to a category, ascribing some use and a title. Interestingly, these responses are often rated as more creative than those requiring participants to design something fitting into a predefined category, such as „furniture‟, or „weapon‟. Ward, Smith and Finke, (1999) state that these „emergent patterns‟ in mental images may be central to the imagery-creativity link for creative ideas are more likely to arise from skilled combination and recombination of images in novel ways. Morrison and Wallace (2001) also cite several imaging abilities important for creativity, such as spatial visualisation, image vividness, and „absorption‟, which refers to the engagement of perceptual, enactive, imaginative, and ideational resources in creative productivity. Of course, to accurately research these abilities requires accurate tools, and, as has been discussed, the controversies in measuring the respective constructs are multifarious.
Despite difficulties with definitions and operationalisation of both constructs, individual differences in mental imagery abilities and the implications that these cognitive facets have for creativity have been researched using traditional statistical procedures. LeBoutillier (1999) and others (Campos & Gonzalez, 1995; Gonzalez, Campos, & Perez, 1997; Anderson & Helstrup, 1993; Ward, 1994; Antonietti, Bologna, & Lupi, 1997; Morrison & Wallace, 2001; Palmiero, Cardi, & Belardinelli, 2011) have conducted extensive investigation into the relationship between self-reported mental imagery and creative performance. LeBoutillier (1999) and LeBoutillier and Marks (2003) found relationships between self-reported mental imagery and creativity as measured by
divergent thinking tasks such as the Alternative Uses Tasks (AUT; Guilford, 1967), however, the effect sizes were small (0.05 and 0.15). The AUT, a measure of verbal fluency, requires the generation of as many uses as possible for common household objects such as a brick or a paperclip, and tasks such as these are often used in creativity research, along with creative synthesis tasks of the type which have been described above, where stimuli must be combined to create new ideas, sometimes according to pre- defined categories (Finke & Slayton, 1988; Finke, Pinker & Farah, 1989). The controllability of mental imagery was responsible for a larger association than was the vividness measure, suggesting that while vividness is important for generating alternative uses for household objects, the controlling and manipulation of these mental images was more beneficial to the creative process. Mast and Kosslyn (2002) revealed that participants who could easily rotate mental images were more likely to correctly reinterpret their rotated image as something new and previously unseen, and this has clear implications for utilisation of mental imagery in creative engagement, as novelty is considered by many to be a requisite of true creativity (Sternberg, 1999; Boden, 1996; Finke & Slayton, 1998). The ability to rotate items in imagery, Mast and Kosslyn claim, may have been a rate-limiting step in the task, in that mental image rotation largely determined whether the participants were able to make new „discoveries‟ from their imagery.
In conclusion, thorough inspection of the literature on the relationship between creativity and mental imagery has highlighted problems relating to the operationalisation of both constructs, further clouding the nature of this relationship and chances of elucidation. These issues are scrutinised in Chapter 3 (Introduction section 3.1), and findings published in the past decade which support a collection of imagery abilities are also outlined. As has been seen, vague definitions and connotations in imagery task items, the raft of psychometric problems and issues with terminology incorporated in questionnaires measuring both imagery and creativity tasks and the treating of separate imagery constructs as though they measure the spectrum of imagery abilities, despite evidence of a multifaceted construct utilising disparate cortical areas (see Chapter 3, Introduction section 3.1), appear to have interfered with the untangling of these relationships.
CHAPTER 2 RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CREATIVITY AND