Creativity test: method

What it measures

Verbal divergent thinking: generating words whose meanings are far apart (semantic distance), one indicator of creative potential.

Procedure

The visitor types up to 10 single-word common nouns, one at a time, without a time limit, and is asked to make them as different from each other as possible. Each word is checked on entry against the page language's word lists; a word that won't count (not a single word of letters, a number, a proper name, not a known noun, or a repeat) is marked with the reason and takes no slot, so it can be replaced. Words are 2–18 letters. English uses noun, name and number lists derived from WordNet 3.0 (simple plurals accepted); the other languages use noun, name and number lists built from Wiktionary, with inflected forms included.

Parameters

Scoring

Each scored word is turned into a meaning vector from one fixed, multilingual word-embedding space (the version is pinned so scores stay comparable). Score = mean cosine distance over all pairs of scored words × 100 (21 pairs for 7 words); higher means more distant meanings. With fewer than 7 valid words, all valid words are scored (at least 2). Valid words after the 7th are listed but not scored. Scores are comparable only within one language and one embedding version; no comparison with other players is shown.

Valid-run rules

A submission is never rejected for its words; invalid words are skipped with a reason code. Fewer than 2 valid words gives no score.

Differences from the classic task

Same instructions and the same 'first 7 valid of 10' rule as Olson et al. (2021). Differences: meaning distances come from a different, multilingual embedding space than the original, so the published DAT averages do not apply; the word lists come from different sources; runs with 2–6 valid words are still scored; it runs in 18 languages, not only English.

Limitations

The score depends on vocabulary, spelling and language, and on the biases of the embedding space (rare or technical words may sit far from everything). Strategies such as naming objects from different categories change scores. A single run is noisy. Divergent thinking is one part of creativity, not creative achievement. Not a measure of intelligence.

Languages and review status

Word lists for English and 17 further languages: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian. The test page is offered only in these languages. Instructions are in all site languages.

Data sources

English noun checking uses WordNet 3.0 (Princeton University, copyright 2006), under the WordNet licence: https://wordnet.princeton.edu/license-and-commercial-use . Local noun sources include Wiktionary contributors via kaikki.org, under CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ . Filtering and morphology rules are specific to Helibrain. These are data sources; the word lists and item sets are not published here.