The Roles of Memory and Imagination in Creative Evaluation

A previous study, “Creative Evaluation: The Role of Memory in Novelty & Effectiveness Judgements,” by Orwig et al. (2024) found that participants’ description of their processes evaluating responses to the alternate uses task contained more references to the past when evaluating typical answers and more references to the future when evaluating novel ideas. The findings suggest the use of episodic simulation when evaluating uses for objects but did not directly examine how the temporal orientation of episodic simulation relates to idea evaluation. The current study will build on these findings by assessing the degree to which participants rely on memory and imagination when evaluating the effectiveness of typical and novel uses for objects.