Mathias Benedek
Biographic Data
| ID | 4640740 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mathias Benedek |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mathias |
| FAMILY NAME | Benedek |
| SIGNATURE | BENEDEK M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Graz |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6258-4476 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Being female and being well-situated implies higher performance on creative thinking tests
Female students consistently outperform male students in creative thinking across 62 countries. • Socio-economic status (SES) is a strong predictor of creative thinking, comparable to mathematics and reading. • Gender and SES effects on creative thinking are stable globally, with minimal moderation by macro-level variables. Even in the time of artificial intelligence, creative thinking is considered an important 21st century skill. Nevertheless, …
Building the creative self
Understanding how people form beliefs about their own creativity – referred to as the creative self-concept (CSC) – requires examining the informational sources that shape these self-assessments. In this paper, we introduce and validate the Sources of Creative Self-Concept Scale (SoCSC), a questionnaire adapted from self-efficacy research, designed to assess four theorized sources of CSC: mastery experience, vicarious experience, social persuasio…
Automated assessment of creativity in multilingual narratives
Researchers and educators interested in creative writing need a reliable and efficient tool to score the creativity of narratives, such as short stories. Typically, human raters manually assess narrative creativity, but such subjective scoring is limited by labor costs and rater disagreement. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success on creativity tasks, yet they have not been applied to scoring narratives, including multilingual…
Investigating the Validity Evidence of Automated Scoring Methods for Divergent Thinking Assessments
Divergent thinking (DT) ability is a fundamental aspect of creativity, but its assessment remains challenging by the reliance on effortful human ratings and persistent uncertainty regarding how to aggregate scores across a variable number of responses. Recent work demonstrated that automated scoring based on large language models (LLMs) can predict human creativity ratings. Other research has evaluated the psychometric quality of different respon…
Automated Scoring of Creative Achievement
The assessment of creative achievement (CA) can be cumbersome as participants are typically asked to respond to long lists of possible accomplishments that may still miss their very specific achievements. A bottom‐up alternative is to let participants openly report their most significant CAs, which, however, involves more complex scoring such as via human ratings. In this study, we investigated whether language models (LMs) can provide an efficie…
Creative Cognition
Creative cognition research has flourished in recent decades, revealing how extraordinary creative outcomes emerge from ordinary cognitive processes. However, the field faces fragmentation that hinders consensus and integration. This research agenda, developed through a collaborative workshop of 50 European researchers at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands, identifies four critical challenges for advancing creative cognition research. …
Creativity quotes
AI‐Powered Scoring for Creative Thinking
The introduction of the PISA 2022 Creative Thinking assessment underscores the growing need for scalable, valid, and reliable methods to evaluate creativity in international large‐scale assessments. Traditional human scoring, while nuanced, is time‐consuming, costly, and subject to inconsistencies. This paper explores recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP)—particularly transformer‐based large languag…
D-I-WHAT? Identifying creative domains in do-it-yourself videos on YouTube
Agency in Human-AI Collaboration for Image Generation and Creative Writing
The integration of generative artificial intelligence into creative domains raises critical questions about human agency in AI-assisted creation. In this two-study article (study one, n = 6; study two, n = 7), we explored how people experience creative agency during co-creative tasks with AI, focusing on image generation and writing. Using think-aloud protocols and post-task semi-structured interviews, we conducted an analysis to identify four ce…
At the Heart of Creative Thoughts
Creativity research has seldom focused on the neurophysiological dynamics of the subjectively experienced quality of creative ideas. This study reports the reanalysis of an ecological momentary assessment of 157 participants, who previously showed higher heart rate variability (HRV) associated with higher objective creativity in the figural domain and reduced HRV with higher objective creativity in the verbal domain. As a new angle, this study in…
Managing Your Muse
Creative ideation tasks are typically ill-defined and thus should benefit from metacognition.However, the role of metacognitive processes-especially metacognitive control-in creative ideation appears understudied.Therefore, we conducted an online study investigating the relationship between different aspects of metacognitive control and divergent thinking (DT) performance.In line with the recently proposed creative metacognition framework , we de…
Creative Evaluation
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 aspec…
Are your eyes following your thoughts? Exploring individual differences in internal coupling
The eyes are remarkably active during internal cognitive processes and often couple to internal events, but there is substantial interindividual variability in the amount of this internal coupling. These variations present considerable challenges for predicting cognitive states and raise important theoretical questions about their origins. This study explores whether internal coupling serves as a compensation mechanism to supports internal activi…
Reeling in Stories
Creative behaviors are increasingly impacted by digital technologies, but little is known about the way digital technologies support everyday creativity and what factors predict their creative use. We investigated to what extent individual differences in person‐specific (creativity, personality) and platform‐specific (e.g., perceived creativity support) characteristics relate to the creative use of Instagram. The results from a sample of 191 Inst…
Contributions of Metacognition to Creative Performance and Behavior
How are ideas born? Contrary to commonly held beliefs, creative performance, like any goal‐oriented action, requires understanding and managing one's own cognitive processes – thus, efficient metacognition. Recently, a systematic framework of creative metacognition (CMC) has been proposed, assuming the relevance of metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, and control in creative performance. Here, we provide the first comprehensive empirical examinat…
Investigation of Response Aggregation Methods in Divergent Thinking Assessments
Divergent thinking (DT) ability is widely regarded as a central cognitive capacity underlying creativity, but its assessment is challenged by the fact that DT tasks yield a variable number of responses. Various approaches for the scoring of DT tasks have been proposed, which differ in how responses are evaluated and aggregated within a task. The present study aimed to identify methods that maximize psychometric quality while also reducing the con…
Envisioning the Future of Creative Thinking Assessment
The PISA assessment 2022 of creative thinking was a moonshot effort that introduced significant advancements over existing creativity tests, including a broad range of domains (written, visual, social, and scientific), implementation in many languages, and sophisticated scoring methods. PISA 2022 demonstrated the general feasibility of assessing creative thinking ability comprehensively at an international scale. However, the complexity of its as…
Reliability and validity of a novel Ambulatory Battery of Creativity (ABC)
Creativity
The present study explored the public conceptualization of creativity on Twitter through co-listed hashtags associated with #creativity in a million tweets. Exploratory Graph Analysis was used to identify a network of semantic clusters, and a pre-trained language model yielded the sentiment of the underlying tweets. The semantic clusters reflect well-known everyday creative domains focused on visual and digital arts, storytelling, and handicraft.…
The Processes and Relationships in Composers Scale
We introduce a new inventory labeled the Processes and Relationships in Composers Scale (PRCS). This is a novel inventory developed to self-assess creative and social factors inherent in music composition. The PRCS consists of two separate scales of 12 items each, namely the Composing Processes Scale (CPS) and the Social Relationship Scale (SRS). An exploratory factor analysis revealed that the CPS scale has a single factor structure, while the S…
How workload and availability of spatial reference shape eye movement coupling in visuospatial working memory
Eyes are active in memory recall and visual imagination, yet our grasp of the underlying qualities and factors of these internally coupled eye movements is limited. To explore this, we studied 50 participants, examining how workload, spatial reference availability, and imagined movement direction influence internal coupling of eye movements. We designed a visuospatial working memory task in which participants mentally moved a black patch along a …
Decoupling of the pupillary light response during internal attention
In a world full of sensory stimuli, attention guides us between the external environment and our internal thoughts. While external attention involves processing sensory stimuli, internal attention is devoted to self-generated representations such as planning or spontaneous mind wandering. They both draw from common cognitive resources, thus simultaneous engagement in both often leads to interference between processes. In order to maintain interna…
It is heart to be creative
A systematic quantitative review of divergent thinking assessments
Contributions of Metacognition to Creative Performance and Behavior
How are ideas born? Contrary to commonly held beliefs, creative performance, like any goal‐oriented action, requires understanding and managing one's own cognitive processes – thus, efficient metacognition. Recently, a systematic framework of creative metacognition (CMC) has been proposed, assuming the relevance of metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, and control in creative performance. Here, we provide the first comprehensive empirical examinat…
Investigation of Response Aggregation Methods in Divergent Thinking Assessments
Divergent thinking (DT) ability is widely regarded as a central cognitive capacity underlying creativity, but its assessment is challenged by the fact that DT tasks yield a variable number of responses. Various approaches for the scoring of DT tasks have been proposed, which differ in how responses are evaluated and aggregated within a task. The present study aimed to identify methods that maximize psychometric quality while also reducing the con…
Envisioning the Future of Creative Thinking Assessment
The PISA assessment 2022 of creative thinking was a moonshot effort that introduced significant advancements over existing creativity tests, including a broad range of domains (written, visual, social, and scientific), implementation in many languages, and sophisticated scoring methods. PISA 2022 demonstrated the general feasibility of assessing creative thinking ability comprehensively at an international scale. However, the complexity of its as…
A continuous measure of phasic electrodermal activity
Electrodermal activity is characterized by the superposition of what appear to be single distinct skin conductance responses (SCRs). Classic trough-to-peak analysis of these responses is impeded by their apparent superposition. A deconvolution approach is proposed, which separates SC data into continuous signals of tonic and phasic activity. The resulting phasic activity shows a zero baseline, and overlapping SCRs are represented by predominantly…
Associative abilities underlying creativity.
Empirical approaches to cognitive ability claim that divergent thinking represents a useful estimate for the potential of creative thought. According to associative approaches, the ability to fluently retrieve and combine remote associations was suggested to facilitate creative solutions. Taken together, these approaches suggest a close relationship of associative processes and divergent thinking, which so far, however, has not been properly test…
The relationship between intelligence and creativity
The relationship between intelligence and creativity has been subject to empirical research for decades. Nevertheless, there is yet no consensus on how these constructs are related. One of the most prominent notions concerning the interplay between intelligence and creativity is the threshold hypothesis, which assumes that above-average intelligence represents a necessary condition for high-level creativity. While earlier research mostly supporte…
The Road to Creative Achievement
This study investigated the significance of different well–established psychometric indicators of creativity for real–life creative outcomes. Specifically, we tested the effects of creative potential, intelligence, and openness to experiences on everyday creative activities and actual creative achievement. Using a heterogeneous sample of 297 adults, we performed latent multiple regression analyses by means of structural equation modelling. We fou…
Intelligence, creativity, and cognitive control
Intelligence and creativity are known to be correlated constructs suggesting that they share a common cognitive basis. The present study assessed three specific executive abilities - updating, shifting, and inhibition - and examined their common and differential relations to fluid intelligence and creativity (i.e., divergent thinking ability) within a latent variable model approach. Additionally, it was tested whether the correlation of fluid int…
The roles of associative and executive processes in creative cognition
Are creative ideas novel and useful?
Default and Executive Network Coupling Supports Creative Idea Production
The role of attention in creative cognition remains controversial. Neuroimaging studies have reported activation of brain regions linked to both cognitive control and spontaneous imaginative processes, raising questions about how these regions interact to support creative thought. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we explored this question by examining dynamic interactions between brain regions during a divergent thinking task. …
Creative Cognition and Brain Network Dynamics
Looking for ideas
Humans have a highly developed visual system, yet we spend a high proportion of our time awake ignoring the visual world and attending to our own thoughts. The present study examined eye movement characteristics of goal-directed internally focused cognition. Deliberate internally focused cognition was induced by an idea generation task. A letter-by-letter reading task served as external task. Idea generation (vs. reading) was associated with more…
Creativity on tap? Effects of alcohol intoxication on creative cognition
Anecdotal reports link alcohol intoxication to creativity, while cognitive research highlights the crucial role of cognitive control for creative thought. This study examined the effects of mild alcohol intoxication on creative cognition in a placebo-controlled design. Participants completed executive and creative cognition tasks before and after consuming either alcoholic beer (BAC of 0.03) or non-alcoholic beer (placebo). Alcohol impaired execu…
Robust prediction of individual creative ability from brain functional connectivity
Significance People’s capacity to generate creative ideas is central to technological and cultural progress. Despite advances in the neuroscience of creativity, the field lacks clarity on whether a specific neural architecture distinguishes the highly creative brain. Using methods in network neuroscience, we modeled individual creative thinking ability as a function of variation in whole-brain functional connectivity. We identified a brain networ…
Assessment of real-life creativity
This article introduces the Inventory of Creative Activities and Achievements (ICAA), a broad-based assessment of individual differences in real-life creativity. The ICAA provides independent scales for the frequency of engagement in everyday creative activity and the level of creative achievement across 8 creative domains. A formal test analysis based on 7 Little-C samples and 2 Pro-C samples (overall N = 1,566) provides evidence for the reliabi…
Toward a neurocognitive framework of creative cognition
Creativity on tap 2
Neural Representations of Conceptual Fixation during Creative Imagination
A large body of research has revealed that viewing example image stimuli tends to constrain creative idea generation. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying such visual fixation in creative cognition are unclear. In the present experiment, we explored whether example images impacted creative imagination and patterns of neural activity within brain regions associated with visual object recognition. Participants first viewed example imag…
What’s Creative About Sentences? A Computational Approach to Assessing Creativity in a Sentence Generation Task
Evaluating creativity of verbal responses or texts is a challenging task due to psychometric issues associated with subjective ratings and the peculiarities of textual data. We explore an approach to objectively assess the creativity of responses in a sentence generation task to 1) better understand what language-related aspects are valued by human raters and 2) further advance the developments toward automating creativity evaluations. Over the c…
Assessing Raters
Creativity research crucially relies on creativity evaluations by external raters, but it is not clear what properties characterize good raters. In the present study, we investigated whether rater personality and rater creativity are related to discernment (i.e., the ability to distinguish creative from uncreative responses) when evaluating others’ responses. To this end, 166 novice raters evaluated a pre‐selected set of responses from the altern…
Multilingual semantic distance
Creativity research commonly involves recruiting human raters to judge the originality of responses to divergent thinking tasks, such as the alternate uses task (AUT). These manual scoring practices have benefited the field, but they also have limitations, including labor-intensiveness and subjectivity, which can adversely impact the reliability and validity of assessments. To address these challenges, researchers are increasingly employing autom…
Brain Connectivity-Based Prediction of Combining Remote Semantic Associates for Creative Thinking
Associative thinking plays a major role in creativity, as it involves the ability to link distant concepts. Yet, the neural mechanisms allowing to combine distant associates in creative thinking tasks remain poorly understood. We investigated the whole-brain functional connectivity patterns related to combining remote associations for creative thinking. Using a connectome predictive modeling approach, we examined whole-brain functional connectivi…
Step-by-step to more creativity
Research indicated an association of acute and chronic physical activity with creative ideation performance. However, no study to date applied ecologically valid ambulatory methods with the potential to generalize these positive relationships to everyday life contexts. This study assessed acute and chronic physical activity (i.e., number of steps assessed via acceleration sensors) as well as creative ideation performance (in the verbal and figura…
Reliability and validity of a novel Ambulatory Battery of Creativity (ABC)
Creativity
The present study explored the public conceptualization of creativity on Twitter through co-listed hashtags associated with #creativity in a million tweets. Exploratory Graph Analysis was used to identify a network of semantic clusters, and a pre-trained language model yielded the sentiment of the underlying tweets. The semantic clusters reflect well-known everyday creative domains focused on visual and digital arts, storytelling, and handicraft.…
The Processes and Relationships in Composers Scale
We introduce a new inventory labeled the Processes and Relationships in Composers Scale (PRCS). This is a novel inventory developed to self-assess creative and social factors inherent in music composition. The PRCS consists of two separate scales of 12 items each, namely the Composing Processes Scale (CPS) and the Social Relationship Scale (SRS). An exploratory factor analysis revealed that the CPS scale has a single factor structure, while the S…
How workload and availability of spatial reference shape eye movement coupling in visuospatial working memory
Eyes are active in memory recall and visual imagination, yet our grasp of the underlying qualities and factors of these internally coupled eye movements is limited. To explore this, we studied 50 participants, examining how workload, spatial reference availability, and imagined movement direction influence internal coupling of eye movements. We designed a visuospatial working memory task in which participants mentally moved a black patch along a …
Creativity in Education and Neuroscience (38 works) · Psychology (37 works) · Creativity (32 works) · Cognitive psychology (26 works) · Social Psychology (25 works) · Cognition (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Neuroscience (12 works) · Divergent thinking (10 works) · Mind wandering and attention (10 works)