"Everyday Creativity: A Systematic Literature Review" by Ana Luisa Ilha Villanova and Miguel Pina e Cunha
Summary
This article from the Journal of Creative Behavior presents a systematic literature review of "everyday creativity," aiming to clarify its definition and characteristics. The authors highlight the lack of a comprehensive, singular definition for this concept, often referred to as "little-c creativity," in contrast to "Big-C creativity" which denotes genius-level achievements. The review proposes a more inclusive understanding by integrating individualistic and sociocultural perspectives, emphasising that everyday creativity involves producing something original and meaningful that can be either a personal "creative experience" or a "creative product" judged by one's immediate social circle. The paper also explores everyday creativity through the "4 Ps" framework (person, process, product, and press), revealing its habitual, ubiquitous, and personally significant nature in daily life, and ultimately suggesting future research avenues to expand its study beyond the traditional creativity field.
"Augmented Creativity: Bridging the real and virtual worlds to enhance creative play" by Fabio Zünd, Mattia Ryffel, Stéphane Magnenat, Alessia Marra, Maurizio Nitti, Mubbasir Kapadia, Gioacchino Noris, Kenny Mitchell, Markus Gross, Robert W. Sumner
Summary
This paper introduces "Augmented Creativity," a concept leveraging Augmented Reality (AR) on mobile devices to enhance real-world creative activities and education by bridging physical interaction with digital experiences. The authors present six prototype applications demonstrating this concept, including a colouring book app that animates children's drawings, a music app for tangible song arrangement, and AR games promoting physical movement and cooperation. Other applications involve a city-wide gaming framework for urban exploration, a system for authoring interactive narratives, and an approach to visual robot programming that makes abstract concepts tangible. Ultimately, the work aims to use AR to direct attention back to classic creative play while offering engaging digital enhancements, fostering both creativity and learning.
"Beauty in the Eye of Expert and Nonexpert Beholders: A Study in the Appraisal of Art" by Paul Hekkert and Piet C. W. Van Wieringen
Summary
This scholarly article, "Beauty in the Eye of Expert and Nonexpert Beholders: A Study in the Appraisal of Art," by Paul Hekkert and Piet C. W. Van Wieringen, delves into how both professional art experts and non-experts perceive and evaluate art. Published in The American Journal of Psychology in 1996, the study investigates the criteria and agreement (or disagreement) in judgments of art between these two distinct groups. It particularly focuses on how factors like originality and craftsmanship influence their assessment of aesthetic quality, noting that experts tend to prioritise originality more highly than non-experts. The research aims to provide a more detailed understanding of art appreciation differences by using a methodology that more closely resembles real-world art appraisal scenarios.
"The Influence of Art Expertise and Training on Emotion and Preference Ratings for Representational and Abstract Artworks" by Jorien van Paasschen, Francesca Bacci, David P. Melcher
Summary
This research article explores how art expertise and training influence emotional and preference ratings for both representational and abstract artworks. The study involved art experts and novices, with a subgroup of novices receiving brief art historical training, rating artworks in both laboratory and museum settings. Key findings indicate that while art experts rate artworks higher in terms of beauty and personal preference, basic emotional responses (valence and arousal) remain consistent across all observer groups, suggesting a universal element to immediate emotional reactions to art. Interestingly, artworks viewed digitally in the lab were often preferred over those seen in the museum, and prior exposure to artworks generally led to higher ratings of beauty and liking.
"Who Cares About Imagination, Creativity, and Innovation, and Why? A Review" by Marie J. C. Forgeard and James C. Kaufman
Summary
This research article investigates how academic papers articulate the importance of imagination, creativity, and innovation (ICI). The authors reviewed 200 empirical studies across various disciplines, including psychology, business, and education journals, to determine if and how researchers explain why these concepts are worthy of study. The findings reveal that a significant majority of articles (71%) offered little to no explicit discussion on the importance of ICI, often treating them as dependent variables to be predicted rather than predictors of other outcomes. While reasons for studying ICI varied by journal type, with "business, economics, and productivity" being the most common, the overall trend suggests researchers often assume their audience already understands the inherent value of ICI, missing opportunities for deeper justification.
"Creative Synthesis- Exploring the process of extraordinary group creativity" by Sarah Harvey
Summary
This academic article proposes a dialectical model of extraordinary group creativity, suggesting that rather than simply generating a wide variety of ideas, breakthrough creative output arises from the integration of diverse perspectives within a group, which the author terms creative synthesis. This synthesis acts as a dynamic framework guiding the development of radical ideas, or exemplars, which in turn refine the synthesis over time. The author contrasts this with traditional random variation models of creativity, arguing that creative synthesis offers a better explanation for groups that consistently produce groundbreaking results. The article outlines process facilitators of this synthesis, such as collective attention and enacting ideas, and discusses how group resources like cognitive skills and diversity serve as boundary conditions for the model.
"Leadership of Creativity: Entity-Based, Relational, and Complexity Perspectives" by Russ Marion
Summary
This academic chapter, "Leadership of Creativity: Entity-Based, Relational, and Complexity Perspectives," explores how creativity is fostered within organisations, moving beyond the traditional focus on individual attributes to examine collective and systemic dynamics. It begins by reviewing established "entity-based" research, which investigates individual characteristics and supportive conditions for creativity. However, the chapter then shifts to highlight the emerging concept of collective creativity, where innovative insights arise from the interactions and conflicts among diverse individuals and ideas, rather than from a single person. Finally, it delves into complexity theory as a framework for understanding how leadership can actively enable these emergent, non-linear processes, leading to increased creativity, adaptability, and learning within organisations.
"Collective Creativity and Innovation: An Interdisciplinary Review, Integration,and Research Agenda" by Oguz A. Acar, Aybars Tuncdogan, Daan van Knippenberg, and Karim R. Lakhani
Summary
This interdisciplinary review explores the critical factors influencing collective creativity and innovation, highlighting its importance for organisational competitiveness and economic growth. The authors address the fragmented nature of existing research by proposing an integrative framework built on a new taxonomy of collectivity types: attention-based, divergence-based, and convergence-based collectives. This framework analyses how cognitive, social, and organisational architecture impact innovation, demonstrating that the optimal structure varies depending on the collective's nature. Ultimately, the paper aims to synthesise disparate findings, foster cross-disciplinary communication, and set a comprehensive research agenda for future study in this vital field.
"Beyond the Surface: Exploring the Relationship between Value Diversity and Team Creativity" by Melrona Kirrane, Matthias Kramer & Hermann Lassleben
Summary
This document is an academic article from the Creativity Research Journal, published by Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group) in April-June 2020. Titled "Beyond the Surface: Exploring the Relationship between Value Diversity and Team Creativity," the study investigates how differing personal values within teams influence their creative output. The authors, Melrona Kirrane, Matthias Kramer, and Hermann Lassleben, delve into two specific forms of value diversity – variety (all members are dissimilar) and separation (members form subgroups based on values) – and analyse their respective positive and negative associations with team creativity. Additionally, the research considers the mediating role of team communication in these relationships, ultimately aiming to provide a more nuanced understanding of how deep-level diversity impacts a team's ability to generate novel and useful ideas.
"Collaborative Creativity—Group Creativity and Team Innovation" by Paul B. Paulus, Mary Dzindolet, and Nicholas W. Kohn
Summary
This comprehensive handbook chapter, "Collaborative Creativity—Group Creativity and Team Innovation," by Paulus, Dzindolet, and Kohn, delves into the scientific evidence surrounding creativity and innovation within both temporary groups and long-term teams. The authors distinguish between these entities, highlighting that while research on group creativity often uses objective lab data with students, studies on team innovation more frequently rely on self-reports. The piece explores various factors influencing team creativity, such as psychological safety, leadership styles, the role of conflict, and group cohesion, alongside the impact of team characteristics like size and diversity. Ultimately, it aims to integrate research from both group creativity and team innovation to provide a more holistic understanding of collaborative creative processes in organisations and offer practical suggestions for fostering innovation.
"The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem-Solving" by Léonard Boussioux, Jacqueline N. Lane, Miaomiao Zhang, Vladimir Jacimovic, Karim R. Lakhani
Summary
This academic paper from Organization Science explores the efficacy of generative AI in creative problem-solving, specifically comparing human-generated ideas to those produced through human-AI collaboration. The authors conducted a crowdsourcing challenge for sustainable business ideas, assessing novelty, strategic viability, environmental value, financial value, and overall quality of solutions. Key findings indicate that while human crowds excel in generating highly novel ideas, human-AI partnerships, especially with iterative, human-guided "differentiated search" prompting, yield solutions with superior overall quality and value. The research highlights the potential of AI to cost-effectively augment early innovation stages and suggests a future where human and AI capabilities are integrated for more impactful problem-solving.
"Human-AI Co-Creativity: Exploring Synergies Across Levels of Creative Collaboration" by Jennifer Haase and Sebastian Pokutta
Summary
This source explores Human-AI Co-Creativity, arguing that generative AI can significantly enhance human creative abilities by acting as a collaborative partner rather than just a tool. It outlines a progression through four levels of digital tool integration in creative tasks, from simple digital pens to sophisticated AI co-creators that contribute original ideas. Using examples from mathematics, the authors illustrate how AI can move beyond assisting with complex computations to actively participating in the discovery of novel solutions, suggesting a future where AI complements and amplifies human creativity for unprecedented achievements. The text also touches on the philosophical debate surrounding the "true" creativity of AI and the importance of designing AI systems that support human skills.
"Perspectives on the Social Psychology of Creativity" by Teresa M. Amabile and Julianna Pillemer
Summary
This document, "Perspectives on the Social Psychology of Creativity," traces the historical development and key ideas within this field. It highlights how the focus shifted from viewing creativity solely as an innate individual trait of "geniuses" to recognising the significant impact of social and environmental factors. The article emphasizes the Intrinsic Motivation Principle, proposing that internal drive for a task enhances creativity, while external motivators can hinder it. It also introduces the Componential Theory of Creativity, which integrates individual abilities with the influence of the social environment, and discusses measurement techniques like the consensual assessment technique (CAT). The authors conclude by suggesting future directions, advocating for a more interdisciplinary and comprehensive understanding of creativity in its social context.
"A Creative Personality Scale for the Adjective Check List" by Harrison G. Gough
Summary
This research introduces a new 30-item Creative Personality Scale designed for the Adjective Check List (ACL) to identify creative talent. Previous attempts to measure creativity using the ACL and intelligence tests had yielded inconclusive results. By analysing responses from various samples and using diverse criteria for creativity, the developers selected items that significantly correlated with criterion ratings of creativity across different groups. This new scale, incorporating both positive and negative items, demonstrates reliability and moderate validity, suggesting its potential as a useful tool for assessing creative potential.
"Testing Creativity and Personality to Explore Creative Potentials in the Science Classroom" by Tamara Roth, Cathérine Conradty & Franz X. Bogner
Summary
This paper investigates how creativity and personality relate to creative potential in science classrooms. The researchers used shortened versions of two scales, the Cognitive Processes Associated with Creativity (CPAC) and the Big Five Inventory (BFI-10), to measure these aspects in secondary school students. They found connections between certain personality traits and aspects of creativity, specifically between conscientiousness and the feeling of full immersion known as "flow," and also observed gender differences in creativity depending on age, with younger boys scoring higher in "act" (conscious creative processes) and older girls scoring higher in "flow." The study concludes by suggesting pedagogical approaches, such as providing more freedom and reducing extrinsic motivators, that could help foster creativity in science education, highlighting its growing importance in a rapidly changing world.
"Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model" by Rafael Rafailov, Archit Sharma, Eric Mitchell, Stefano Ermon, Christopher D. Manning, Chelsea Finn
Summary
This paper introduces Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a novel method for fine-tuning large language models based on human feedback. Unlike traditional Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which is complex and unstable, DPO simplifies the process by directly optimizing the language model policy. It achieves this by leveraging a theoretical mapping between reward functions and optimal policies, transforming the preference learning problem into a straightforward classification task. This eliminates the need for training a separate reward model or using reinforcement learning, resulting in a more stable, performant, and computationally lightweight approach that matches or surpasses RLHF in aligning language models with human preferences.
"Creative Preference Optimization" by Mete Ismayilzada, Antonio Laverghetta Jr., Simone A. Luchini, Reet Patel, Antoine Bosselut, Lonneke van der Plas, Roger Beaty
Summary
This document introduces Creative Preference Optimization (CRPO), a novel method designed to enhance the creativity of Large Language Models (LLMs). The authors argue that existing methods often focus too narrowly on single aspects of creativity, proposing CRPO as a modular approach that integrates signals from multiple creativity dimensions—novelty, diversity, surprise, and quality—into the preference optimization process. To train and evaluate their models, they also present MUCE, a new large-scale dataset of human creativity assessments. Their experiments show that models trained with CRPO outperform baseline LLMs, including strong commercial models, in generating content that is more novel, diverse, and surprising while maintaining high quality, suggesting that directly optimizing for creativity within preference frameworks is a promising direction.
"Creative potential in educational settings: its nature, measure, and nurture" by Baptiste Barbot, Maud Besançon & Todd Lubart
Summary
This document is a journal article from Education 3-13: International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education titled "Creative potential in educational settings: its nature, measure, and nurture." Authored by Baptiste Barbot, Maud Besançon, and Todd Lubart, the article focuses on understanding and fostering creative potential in children. It argues against a simplistic view of creativity, proposing instead that it is multifaceted and partly domain-specific. The authors discuss the importance of accurately measuring this potential and suggest ways that educational settings can nurture creativity, highlighting the impact of classroom environment and teacher attitudes.
"EEG alpha power and creative ideation"by Andreas Fink, Mathias Benedek
Summary
This document is an academic review article published in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, focusing on the relationship between EEG alpha power and creative ideation. It examines various studies that show a consistent link between increased alpha brainwave activity and creative thinking, suggesting this phenomenon might reflect internally directed attention or efficient memory processing. Despite some inconsistent findings in the broader field of creativity neuroscience, the authors argue that the association between alpha power and creative ideation is one of the most reliable observations and propose future research directions to clarify the specific cognitive processes involved.
by Izabela Lebuda, Darya L. Zabelina, Maciej Karwowski
Summary
This document is a meta-analysis published in the journal "Personality and Individual Differences" that examines the relationship between mindfulness and creativity. The researchers compiled data from 20 studies conducted between 1977 and 2015, finding a statistically significant, albeit relatively weak, positive correlation between these two concepts. Notably, they discovered that the connection was stronger for certain types of mindfulness, particularly the open-monitoring aspect, and also stronger when creativity was assessed using insight tasks rather than divergent thinking tests. The study concludes that while the link exists and may even be causal, different facets of mindfulness appear to influence creative abilities in distinct ways.
