What Creativity is, and What it Isn’t

 

How SfNC is leading the field of creativity science in evolving, defining, and standardizing the semantics of creativity and its investigation.

Human creativity is complex, messy, endlessly fascinating, and critically important – that’s why we’ve devoted our careers to understanding it. Its complexity raises considerable challenges in aligning on a shared vocabulary and common set of operational definitions. The Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity has recently spearheaded a series of initiatives aimed at sharpening the concepts within creativity and clarifying their relationships, to increase the effectiveness of our research efforts and facilitate its application and understanding by the public. In this piece, we discuss the motivation for these initiatives, highlight progress to date, and introduce the two core projects currently underway that we believe will propel our field forward.


The Challenge of Conceptualizing Creativity

As any field grows, different strands of research evolve independently as researchers use different operational definitions depending on their background, approach, and techniques. This diversity, while challenging, reflects the evolving nature of the discipline and its broadening scope. The neuroscience of creativity, now entering its 3rd decade, has, indeed, become diverse in scope and is growing rapidly in ambition and impact.  

 In addition to the normal growing pains of any new and expanding field of study, developing ontological and epistemological clarity across different strands of creativity research poses additional challenges due to the complexity of the neuro-cognitive processes involved in creative thought and the wide array of biological, behavioral, and psycho-social factors that contribute to these processes. Though SfNC’s aim is primarily to understand the neural basis of creativity, doing so effectively involves considering the many contexts in which creativity occurs, and requires communication and collaboration between scholars who study creativity through different lenses (e.g. clinical, arts, education, psycho-social, humanist, industrial-organizational, etc.) so that our efforts are complementary instead of redundant or incompatible.

In recent years, other disciplines in the psychological and brain sciences have addressed similar semantic and ontological discrepancies through directed consensus-building among peer scientists (e.g., the Cognitive Ontology Project). SfNC recognizes the necessity for convergence among creativity researchers as a sign of our field's maturation and a challenge we’re eager to address. Achieving definitional clarity across the neuroscience of creativity will enable faster research progress and facilitate communication within the scientific community and between researchers, employers, educators, innovation stakeholders, and the general public.

In 2019, the SfNC Executive Committee designated this issue as a top priority and set out several strategic efforts to push this project forward. These efforts include inquiries into the theories, constructs, and operational definitions of creativity. The first initiative was endorsed by SfNC and completed in collaboration with other leaders in this space and the broader community of peer creativity researchers.


Initial Project: Developing a Neurally-Informed Ontology of Creativity Measurement

Our first project was an exploration of the fit between the constructs used in creativity research and the tasks used to operationalize these constructs, through a neuroscientific lens. To do so, we generated models of creativity-relevant cognitive constructs based on behavioral data by querying expert creativity researchers (including SfNC members). We then used NeuroSynth to generate meta-analytic models of the neural activity that corresponded to those cognitive constructs. We generated separate neural models based on meta-analyses of individual experimental tasks that are commonly used to represent those same constructs in the neuroscience of creativity literature. By comparing the expert-driven NeuroSynth models of creativity-related constructs to the meta-analyses of experimental tasks in creativity research, we were able to examine how well the tasks used in creativity neuroscience corresponded to the underlying neurocognitive constructs they purport to measure.

This project, published in Kenett et al. (2020), demonstrated proof of concept for leveraging neuroimaging to help determine which sets of tasks best capture a target set of constructs.   Some constructs, such as cognitive control, novelty, and divergent thinking, align well with the neural data, while others show weaker correlations. As more detailed and larger datasets become available, this method has potential to refine the choice of constructs the field uses to define creativity, as well as the choice of tasks used to measure those constructs in the brain and behavior.


Current Initiatives: Definitions of Creativity Constructs and their Theoretical Relations

SfNC’s Executive Committee, in collaboration with other major creativity science societies (APA Division 10 and ISSCI),  has recently launched two ambitious and extensive initiatives. These two projects aim to develop consensus definitions and ontological clarity around creativity by leveraging a large number of expert voices that represent the diversity of perspectives, approaches, demographics, and geographies in our field. They use distinct yet complementary methodologies, and thus, together, provide a basis from which we may move forward together. 


The Creativity Definitions Consensus Project (hereafter: the “ Definitions Consensus Project”)

Led by Evangelia G. Chrysikou and Yoed N. Kenett

About the Project

The Definitions Consensus project aims to produce a cutting-edge consensus paper on the definitions of key constructs that drive creativity research at this point in time. This project will use a “bottom-up” approach to resolve ambiguity and reach consensus definitions for what we mean when we use specific terms in creativity research. The Definitions Consensus project will generally follow the Delphi method for achieving consensus among a group of experts, following recent relevant examples in other fields in cognitive psychology (e.g., semantic memory, visual distraction, and action control).

Approach

Phase 1: Creativity researchers (defined as individuals with faculty positions at a university or center, whose primary research interest is creativity) will be invited to participate as co-authors. These criteria mimic the approach taken by other fields that have produced multi-authored papers, like physics or biology. Our aim is to involve about 70 creativity researchers from around the world.

Phase 2: Invitees who agree to participate will be provided with a list of 25-30 constructs and will be asked to vote on the completeness and appropriateness of the list for inclusion of the constructs in the project. A calibration of the list will be performed, as needed, with the removal of low-agreement constructs and the addition of missing constructs.

Phase  3: In small groups of 2-3 individuals, participants will be assigned to develop a definition for a randomly selected construct. The definitions should be no longer than 500 words, plus references, as needed.  

Phase  4: The project leads will combine all responses and the full group of project participants will participate in a voting process where they will weigh in on all definitions, stating their agreement and/or suggesting edits to each definition. The full list of definitions will be recalibrated as needed, and groups may rework their definitions following the voting and feedback phase.

Phase  5: A second voting process will take place following re-calibration, where the goal is to reach ~85-90% agreement within the full group on each definition. Anyone who has a fundamental irreconcilable difference with the majority definition will craft a dissent, which will be included with the construct's definition and percent agreement.

Outcome

The Definitions Consensus project leads will develop the paper and all participants will be co-authors who’ll get the chance to review and edit the draft prior to submission for publication in a major journal. The final product will be a consensus paper on the definitions of key constructs in creativity research circa 2024-2025, including any remaining definitional issues noted in dissents, that will support and propel future research.

 
 

Figure 1. A possible representation of the outcome of the Creativity Consensus Definitions Project, showing key creativity-related concepts and their formal definitions as co-authored by groups of experts through a collaborative peer-review process. 

The Creativity Ontology Project (hereafter: the “Ontology Project”)

Led by Adam E. Green and James C. Kaufman

About the Project

The overall objective of this project is to develop a formal ontology for creativity and creativity-related constructs, with the ultimate goal of helping researchers within and across areas of creativity research communicate, collaborate, and use meaningful equivalencies and distinctions in their scholarship. The project is structured to identify points of convergence in how a global set of leading creativity researchers understand the meanings of core creativity constructs. Specifically, the project identifies the component terms that are the most definitionally essential to each construct.

The outcome will be a clear reference for 1) the namable components that are most essential to the meaning of core creativity constructs, and 2) the namable similarities and differences between these constructs. In its simplest form, this will be distilled to a straightforward table of terms that can be easily understood by both experts and newcomers to creativity. More nuanced metrics and data visualizations will support additional insights, but the primary goal is to provide a simple and effective reference for understanding and directly comparing core constructs in creativity. 
Approach

This project has two main aims. The first aim is to parse and understand separate meanings of the term, “creativity”: 1) creativity as process, 2) creativity as the attribute of a product, and 3) creativity as the attribute of a person/agent. For each of these meanings, we seek to identify terms that are the most definitionally essential – the component processes most essential for creativity, the attributes most essential to the creativity of a product, and the attributes most essential to the creativity of a person. In a multi-phase study, a large and broadly representative group of creativity expert authors will be invited to generate candidate terms, weigh in on groupings and omissions, and then ultimately rate them on the extent to which they are central to each meaning of creativity (process, attribute of product, attribute of person/agent).

The second aim of the project is to identify distinctions and commonalities between creativity and other expert-selected constructs that are frequently used interchangeably with creativity (whether they should be or not!). We will start by focusing on creativity as a process (and likewise focus on the other selected constructs as processes).

Critically, these similarities and differences will be clearly identified in the form of expert-generated words, as opposed to maps or other graphic/visual representations and metrics as are commonly used in formal ontology tables. Though graphic/visual representations have great value, our goal is to offer a clear and jargon-free presentation of nameable distinctions and commonalities. This approach can enable simple and direct comparisons and contrasts between the constructs, allowing many possible applications for research, theory, and practice.

Outcome

This project will result in a manuscript featuring easily-referenced tables of terms that reflect the combined input of the broad set of creativity expert authors invited to participate in the project. Critically, these tables will represent the nameable overlaps and distinctions between creativity-relevant constructs. For example, looking across columns for constructs such as creativity, imagination, and innovation will readily show which components these constructs have in common and which ones are distinct. Component terms in each column will be ordered by how essential they are to the construct at the top of the column (based on the responses from the expert authors). Thus, it will be possible to see not only the components that overlap between constructs but the differences/similarities in how essential these components are to respective constructs. It will also be possible to compare the component terms to each other by looking at the construct columns (and positions within columns) in which the expert opinions place them.


NOTE: In the table below, the constructs and components shown here were generated quasi-randomly and are for demonstration purposes only. This example table is abbreviated (the actual table will be more complete — we anticipate it will include 10 components for each of six constructs).

Figure 2. A possible representation of an ontology table for creativity-related constructs that will result from the Ontology Project. The construct columns will represent core creativity-related constructs identified with the greatest convergence by the field-wide group of authors. Each column will list approximately 10 components that receive convergent endorsements for that construct. Components will be ordered based on the group's ratings of how essential each component is to each construct (with means and standard deviations shown). Colors will be used to highlight components that appear for multiple constructs. Uncolored cells will indicate components that are unique to one construct. This will allow a quick visual scan of the overlaps and distinctions between constructs. The goal is to convey 1) the namable components that are most essential to the meaning of each construct, and 2) the namable similarities and differences between these constructs.

Next Steps and Future Directions

We’re excited to share that our Definitions Consensus Project and Ontology Project are actively underway. These initiatives are crucial steps toward refining the definitions and frameworks of creativity and creativity-related constructs. Over the coming months, we will keep the community updated on the progress and findings from these projects. 

We will also continue to be involved in the design and implementation of other ontology projects, such as those within the NeuroArts space. Our aim is to enhance collaboration and clarity in creativity research and its related fields, ultimately benefiting both scientific understanding and its wide application.  We hope that the results of these projects will help frame comprehensive theoretical models of creativity, develop a standardized toolkit for researchers in this space, and raise the overall level of scientific rigor and translation for applications.