Creative activities are typically thought to be positively associated with creative ability, whether because more creative individuals select into creative activities, or because those activities support the development of creativity, or both. However, the PISA 2022 creative thinking report revealed an unexpected finding: Creative ability was…

Participants imagined, drew, and wrote about novel alien creatures (cf. Ward, 1994). Judges rated the creativity of the drawings alone, paragraphs alone, or drawings and paragraphs together. Much prior research has examined how participants rely on available exemplars and categorical knowledge in this task; here we focus on understanding why some…