Recognizing ideas generated in a creative thinking task: Effect of the subjective novelty

Prior studies have illustrated that a superior memory exists for self-access ideas compared with comprehension in close-ended problems. For example, an aha! experience followed by sudden solutions for insight problems can enhance the later long-term memory for such solutions. However, whether there is a superior memory of ideas generated in open-ended creative problems, such as the alternative uses task (AUT), is unknown. Here, we performed two studies through four experiments to investigate the superior memory in the AUT and assessed the relationship between factors related to ideas (i.e., the aha! experience, emotional feeling, subjective novelty, and source) and the recognition accuracy of ideas. By manipulating the number of generated ideas, the study examined whether the effect could be observed in the single-idea (Experiments 1 and 2) and multi-idea (Experiments 3 and 4) versions of the AUT. Study 1 showed that subjective novelty positively predicted the recognition likelihood of ideas, but the aha! experience and emotional feeling were non-significant factors (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 replicated the subjective novelty effect for recognition and found that it was not influenced by the source (old vs. new) of ideas. Study 2 showed that the subjective novelty could predict the recall likelihood (Experiment 3) and discriminative accuracy of ideas (Experiment 4). Taken together, these findings indicate that the subjective novelty of ideas during divergent thinking can benefit long-term memory formation and suggest that the process of acquiring new concepts during creative thinking may be dependent on schema consistency.