Effects of a Daytime Nap on Primed and Repeated Remote Associates Tests and Relations with Divergent Creativity
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The effect of napping versus wakefulness was studied on primed and repeated Remote Associate Tests (RATs) and on divergent creativity tests. The participants were 42 students from the USA, studying international courses at a Swedish university. The hypotheses for the RATs were (1), when the correct answers were primed before the nap, the RAT should be solved better for those who entered REM sleep, compared to those with no REM sleep or a resting condition; and (2), when retested the RAT should be solved better after a nap than after rest. For the creativity tests, hypothesis (3) was that creativity should be higher after the nap than after rest. Hypothesis 1 and hypothesis 3 were not supported. Hypothesis 2 was supported in an ANOVA. The REM group improved more than the rest group on the repeated RAT. Also, the No-REM and rest groups differed, strengthening the importance of both REM and No-REM sleep for creative problem-solving.
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Priming with related words and manually writing responses can enhance performance on RATs.
“Research has shown that priming with related words and manually writing responses can enhance performance on RATsstrategies a coach might use for guidance [13,43].”
From Human Creativity in the Age of LLMs: Randomized Experiments on Divergent and Convergent Thinking (2025) · cites this paper as [13]
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- Authors
- Carlsson, I., Davidson, P., & Ors, M.
- Affiliations
- Lund University (SE)
- Corresponding author
- Carlsson, Ingegerd
- ORCID
- Davidson, Per
- Venue
- Creativity Research Journal
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2019-04-03
- Volume
- 31
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 207-214
- ISSN
- 1040-0419 (ISSN-L)
- 1532-6934
- OpenAlex
- W2954067964
- Cited by
- 7
- References
- 39
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 0.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Creativity Research Journal (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Lund University Publications (Lund University) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Fundação Bial (102/10)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Sleep and Wakefulness Research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Creativity in Education and Neuroscience
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Sleep and related disorders
- Keywords
- daytime napping, REM sleep, Remote Associates Test, priming, creative problem solving
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