Grace Lesko¹, Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco¹; ¹University of British Columbia

Of all the cognitive processes, creative thinking seems maximally different from visual processing. Perception is encapsulated and constrained to the available structure in the environment, whereas creativity takes input (and inspiration) from everywhere, varies across individuals, and seems unconstrained—i.e., we cannot predict when an insight will come. Here we demonstrate that creative thinking may be more intimately tied to the visual and temporal structure of experience than previously thought. Subjects completed a “Divergent Association Test” (or DAT) over the course of a “virtual walk” through a 3D rendered space. At different points of the walk, they would be prompted to provide a common noun that was maximally *unrelated* from a previous noun (with the important constraint that it could not just be an item in the room). In the DAT, greater semantic dissimilarity between nouns predicts more creative thinking. We then monitored how subjects’ creativity “ebbed and flowed” over the course of the walk. Critically, all subjects walked towards a doorway at the second half of the walk—a manipulation known to mark an event boundary in time. Half of the subjects walked towards a doorway where they had a clear view of the other room ( “future-is-known”) and the other half, a view into a black void ( “future-is-unknown”). Subjects’ DAT scores in the second half showed a boost when the “future was unknown”, but not when the “future was known”. This result held true when subjects approached three doorways (instead of a black void), suggesting that the effect may come from the inability to anticipate what will happen next, not just the absence of visual input. Thus, visual event structure can fuel divergent thought—leading us to spontaneously explore and sample from a wider space of possibility when we do not know what’s about to come.