Do words speak louder than pictures? Charday Penn/Getty Images
Are you creative? This question is difficult to answer objectively, but now researchers say that asking people to name random words and assessing how different they are could be a new way to measure this ability.
Jay Olson at Harvard University and his colleagues call this word puzzle the Divergent Association Task (DAT) because it measures divergent thinking, a component of creativity involving generating diverse solutions to open-ended problems.
Traditionally, researchers have used two main approaches to assess creativity. One is a questionnaire that quantifies someone’s achievements in a range of…
