Creative Evaluation: The Role of Memory in Novelty & Effectiveness Judgements

How do we assess the quality of an idea? Current theories suggest that episodic memory contributes to creative ideation, implicating memory retrieval and mental simulation in the generation of creative ideas; however, the role of memory in creative evaluation has not been systematically examined. Across two independent online samples (Study 1 n = 50, Study 2 n = 626), we explore how episodic retrieval supports the evaluation of two distinct aspects of creativity: novelty and effectiveness. In both studies, participants were presented with a series of creative ideas–responses on the alternate uses task–and were asked to independently rate them for novelty/effectiveness. Following each rating, participants were prompted to reflect on their process and type a brief description about how they made their evaluation. We apply computational linguistic analysis to quantify the prevalence of episodic/perceptual details (sights, sounds, etc.) in each evaluation, along with past-focused and future-focused words. Consistent with prior work, we observe a negative correlation (r=-.39) between novelty and effectiveness ratings. Ordinal logistic regression models indicate that perceptual detail and temporal orientation of evaluations are predictive of novelty and effectiveness ratings. We show that people refer more to the past when evaluating familiar, effective ideas; conversely, people refer more to the future when evaluating highly novel, less effective ideas. Overall, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that episodic retrieval supports the evaluation of creative ideas.