Back to the Basics: Correspondences Between Creativity Measures and Creative Output (Painting)

Researchers since the 1950s have invested a great deal in creating “gold standard” creativity assessments that can be administered in a controlled laboratory setting. Despite the successes in developing reliable and widely used instruments, these efforts have come at the cost of not using ecologically- and face-valid tasks. In this paper, we describe a novel protocol to fill this critical gap by bringing participants into the laboratory to paint. We also gave them common laboratory-based creativity tasks and questionnaires. First, we were interested in the feasibility of this method: could participants follow instructions to produce paintings of variable quality, as well as whether independent raters would agree on judgments of painting quality. Second, we were interested in the domain-specificity of abstract painting, and whether performance on either or both the Alternate Uses Task and the Test of Creative Imagery Abilities correlated with painting quality. Finally, we examined whether painting quality was associated with particular personality traits, mindsets towards creative activities, fluid intelligence scores, and existing creative hobbies and achievements. Our findings suggest that an in-lab painting task is both feasible and informative, and may help separate creativity in the visual arts domain from verbal creativity and general intelligence.