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Abstract Creativity is a key 21st-century skill and a consistent predictor of academic learning outcomes. Despite decades of research on creativity and learning, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms underlying their relationship. In two studies, we examined whether creativity supports associative learning through associative thinking—the ability to generate novel word associations—an ability central to creativity which has not been previously tied to associative learning. In Study 1, we found that students who generated more novel word associations learned more words on a foreign language learning test 24 h later. In Study 2, we replicated and extended the effect to naturalistic creativity tasks (i.e., writing short stories and sketching line drawings), finding associative thinking mediated the relationship between creativity and associative learning. Importantly, both studies controlled for general intelligence. Our findings suggest that creativity’s contribution to learning operates partly through a shared cognitive capacity for making new connections. 

ABSTRACT 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 assessment approach—such as time‐consuming scoring requiring human raters—implies the risk that it may not be easily applied by the scientific community and practitioners. In this commentary, we outline important next steps building on the PISA assessment to further enhance future assessments of creative thinking. Crucial future directions include 1) determining what tasks and scorings ensure high psychometric quality including content validity, 2) enabling efficient, objective scoring by applying AI methods such as Large Language Models (LLMs), 3) ensuring high language accessibility via multilingual tests, 4) targeting a broader age group, and 5) facilitating standardized, reproducible assessments via an open online testing platform. In sum, these developments would lead to an efficient, validated multilingual test of creative thinking, which enhances the accessibility of effective creative thinking assessments and thereby supports the democratization and reproducibility of creativity research. 

Abstract In this paper, we present results from an experiment using EEG to measure brain activity and explore EEG frequency power associated with gender differences of professional industrial designers while performing two prototypical stages of constrained and open design tasks, problem-solving and design sketching. Results indicate no main effect of gender. However, among other main effects, a consistent main effect of hemisphere for the six frequency bands under analysis was found. In the problem-solving stage, male designers show higher alpha and beta bands in channels of the prefrontal cortices and female designers in the right occipitotemporal cortex and secondary visual cortices. In the design sketching stage, male designers show higher alpha and beta bands in the right prefrontal cortex, and female designers in the right temporal cortex and left prefrontal cortex, where higher theta is also found. Prioritising different cognitive functions seem to play a role in each gender's approach to constrained and open design tasks. Results can be useful to design professionals, students and design educators, and for the development of methodological approaches in design research and education.