CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 551Creativity in Education and NeuroscienceDesign Education and PracticeCognitive Abilities and Testing

Why do ideas get more creative across time? An executive interpretation of the serial order effect in divergent thinking tasks

Beaty, Roger E., Silvia, Paul J.·2012·Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts
DOI 10.1037/a0029171
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

The serial order effect—the tendency for later responses to a divergent thinking task to be better than earlier ones—is one of the oldest and most robust findings in modern creativity work. But why do ideas get better? Using new methods that afford a fine-grained look at temporal trajectories, we contrasted two explanations: the classic spreading activation account and a new account based on executive and strategic aspects of creative thought. After completing measures of fluid intelligence and personality, a sample of young adults (n = 133) completed a 10-min unusual uses task. Each response was time-stamped and then rated for creativity by three raters. Multilevel structural equation models estimated the trajectories of creativity and fluency across time and tested if intelligence moderated the effects of time. As in past work, creativity increased sharply with time and flattened slightly by the task's end, and fluency was highest in the task's first minute and then dropped sharply. Intelligence, however, moderated the serial order effect—as intelligence increased, the serial order effect diminished. Taken together, the findings are more consistent with a view that emphasizes executive processes, particularly processes involved in the strategic retrieval and manipulation of knowledge, than the simple spreading of activation to increasingly remote concepts.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1037/a0029171

Cites

90 of 90 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Divergent thinking is associated with intelligence and the personality trait openness to experience.

    “Because divergent thinking is associated with intelligence (Beaty and Silvia, 2012, Benedek et al., 2012, Jauk et al., 2014, Nusbaum and Silvia, 2011) and the personality trait openness to experience (Feist, 1998, McCrae, 1987, Silvia et al., 2009), participants completed a battery of intelligence tests from the Intelligence Structure Battery (Arendasy et al., 2004) and the Big-Five Structure”

    From Creativity and the default network: A functional connectivity analysis of the creative brain at rest (2014) · cites this paper as Beaty and Silvia, 2012

  • Controlled attention is particularly relevant to divergent thinking because salient, unoriginal ideas can impede the creative thought process.

    “Controlled attention appears to be particularly relevant to divergent thinking because salient, unoriginal ideas can impede the creative thought process. During an alternate uses task, for example, concepts that are strongly semantically associated with the prompt cue (e.g., brick) are often the first responses produced (e.g., “build a brick house”; Beaty and Silvia, 2012, Christensen et al., 1957”

    From Creativity and the default network: A functional connectivity analysis of the creative brain at rest (2014) · cites this paper as Beaty and Silvia, 2012

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Beaty, R. E., & Silvia, P. J.
Affiliations
University of North Carolina at Greensboro (US)
ORCID
Venue
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts
Publisher
American Psychological Association (APA)
Published
2012-11
Volume
6
Issue
4
Pages
309-319
ISSN
  • 1931-3896 (ISSN-L)
  • 1931-390X
DOI
10.1037/a0029171
OpenAlex
W2006850907
Cited by
551
References
90
Citations by year
2026: 37 · 2025: 47 · 2024: 44 · 2023: 91 · 2022: 45 · 2021: 52 · 2020: 47 · 2019: 28 · 2018: 51 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 23 · 2015: 19 · 2014: 27 · 2013: 16 · 2012: 3
FWCI
27.90
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Psychology of Aesthetics Creativity and the Arts (publishedVersion)
  • NC Digital Online Collection of Knowledge and Scholarship (The University of North Carolina at Greensboro) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Creativity in Education and Neuroscience
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Mechanical Engineering › Design Education and Practice
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Cognitive Abilities and Testing
Keywords
serial order effects, divergent thinking, creativity, executive function, fluid intelligence, fluency, spreading activation, personality moderators

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review