Creativity and Hypermnesia for Words and Pictures

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Abstract
The relationships between hypermnesia for pictures and for concrete and abstract words and creative thinking abilities were examined. In Experiment 1, subjects were asked either to form an image or to construct a meaningful sentence for each stimulus word (either highly imageable or difficult to image) presented. A forced-recall procedure was used over three successive trials. Tests of creative thinking were administered during the interim periods. In Experiments 2a and 2b, pictures were the stimuli and different encoding procedures were used in each experiment. All subjects were placed into hypermnesia-present or hypermnesia-absent groups to determine if differences in creative thinking abilities existed between the groups. Hypermnesia for easily imaged words was higher than for abstract words. Subjects in all groups who exhibited the imagery-hypermnesia effect performed higher on the creativity tests than did those who failed to achieve this effect, adding support for a relationship between imagery and creativity. The hypermnesia effect occurred even though the mind was consciously occupied with other tasks.

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