Creativity and Constraints: The Production of Novel Sentences

Two experiments explored how people create novel sentences referring to given entities presented either in line drawings or in nouns. The line drawings yielded more creative sentences than the words, both as rated by judges and objectively in Shannon’s measure of the amount of information that the sentences conveyed. A hypothesis about the cognitive processes of creation predicted this result: creativity depends on constraints. Line drawings of entities present more information about them than nouns denoting the same entities, and so the pictures provide more constraints than the nouns. Hence, line drawings yield more creative sentences than words.