What inspires us? An experimental analysis of the semantic meaning of irrelevant information in creative ideation

Past research showed that apparently irrelevant information for a creativetask at hand can lead to higher creative performance, especially in open-minded individuals. Through two diverse experimental procedures, the present work investigated which type of irrelevance information can inspire (i.e.,increase) the creative performance during a divergent thinking (DT) task andhow open-minded individuals can be inspired by this kind of information. In Experiment 1, the attentional processing of information that was either apparently relevant or irrelevant for the execution of a verbal DT task was assessedby means of an eye-tracking methodology. In Experiment 2, creative performance was explored through a verbal priming paradigm, which forcedly introduced apparently irrelevant information during the DT task. In bothexperiments, the level of irrelevance was operationalized in terms of semanticdistance between the different kind of information. Results from both experi-ments highlighted the role of the semantic meaning of the irrelevant infor-mation as one of the main determinants, along with Openness, of inspiration (i.e., enhancement) of the creative performance.