Abstract:

Creative block is a familiar foe to any who attempt to create, and is especially related to “writers block”. While significant effort has been focused on developing methods to break such blocks, it remains an active challenge. The current study presents a proof-of-concept for a cognitive network sciences-based online algorithm that aims to spark creative ideas: Once a participant “runs out” of ideas in a creative idea generation task, our algorithm suggests word-recommendations to prime new ideas. These word-recommendations are either towards or away from previous ideas, as well as close or far from the target object, based on a conceptual space extracted from the participants responses using online text analysis. Our results indicate that the location of word-recommendations affects the fluency and creativity of ones’ ideas. In addition, we show how participants fluent intelligent and creativity levels affect how they many benefit from these word-recommendations.