Seeing Outside the Box: Salient Associations Disrupt Visual Idea Generation

Generating creative ideas involves flexibly combining concepts stored in memory. Although memory provides a foundation for creative thought, existing associations can also constrain idea generation by acting as a source of interference, particularly when salient and unoriginal information becomes activated. Overcoming fixating effects of salient associations is therefore required to generate novel associations. Although previous research has explored fixation effects in verbal creativity, less is known about how it affects the generation of visual associations. In the present research, we investigated the impact of priming salient associations on the generation of creative visual ideas. In an initial pilot study, participants were shown ambiguous images and asked to provide labels describing them; from these labels, 2 subsets were selected based on their relative frequency in the sample (i.e., high- and low-frequency labels). In 2 experiments, we then tested whether priming participants with these high- and low-frequency labels impacted the subsequent generation of new creative labels. Across both experiments, we found that high-frequency labels had a constraining effect on idea generation: Participants took significantly longer to generate their first response and generated fewer total responses in the high-frequency condition. Moreover, visuospatial intelligence (Gv) reduced susceptibility to this constraining effect, with high-Gv participants generating more creative labels in the high-frequency condition, pointing to a potential inhibitory benefit of Gv. The findings indicate that salient associations have a constraining effect on visual idea generation-even when these associations are linked to ambiguous images-and that Gv may support creative thinking via increased inhibitory control.