Enhancing creative divergent thinking in older adults with a semantic retrieval strategy.

Creative divergent thinking involves the generation of unique ideas by pulling from semantic memory stores and exercising cognitive flexibility to shape these memories into something new. Although cognitive abilities such as episodic memory decline with age, semantic memory tends to remain intact. The current study aims to take advantage of older adults’ strength in semantic memory to investigate the effectiveness of a brief cognitive training to improve creative divergent thinking. Specifically, older adults were trained using a semantic retrieval strategy known as the disassembly strategy in order to improve creativity in the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), which involves generating original uses for objects. We also investigated whether this strategy would transfer to other creativity tasks, specifically, the Divergent Association Task (DAT). Participants were tested on the AUT and DAT across three time points in a single session: before the disassembly strategy was introduced (T0 and T1) and afterwards (T2). Results showed that the disassembly strategy enhances idea novelty in the AUT, though this enhancement did not transfer to DAT performance. Additionally, participants that initially scored lowest on the AUT at T0 showed the greatest increase in AUT performance at T2. This finding provides evidence that older adults can effectively use a semantic retrieval strategy to engage and enhance elements of creative divergent thinking.