Creativity and the need for associative novelty.

Based on J. P. Houston and S. A. Mednick's experiment (see record 1963-06699-001), the differential reinforcing properties of associative novelty were assessed for high-creative and low-creative Ss. 80 undergraduates, the top and bottom 26% of a pool of 156 Ss who had taken the Remote Associates Test (RAT), participated in a 2*4 factorial experiment. The independent variables were creativity, measured by the RAT, and type of reinforcement of nouns; the dependent variable was the number of nouns chosen over blocks of 40 trials. Each S saw 180 cards with 2 words, a noun and a nonnoun, typed on each card. If S chose the nonnoun, E responded with its most common associate. If S chose the noun, E responded with a very common associate, a moderately common associate, a very uncommon associate, or a similar-sounding word, depending on the experimental condition. Neither main effect of creativity nor type of reinforcement was significant (p > .05); only the effect of trials was significant (p