Creative Thinking and Self-Evaluation: The Role of Semantic Memory Structure Across Dimensions and Tasks

ABSTRACT Creativity involves generating ideas that are both original and useful, relying on both cognitive and metacognitive processes. This study examines how individual differences in semantic memory structure shape creative performance and self-evaluations across three experiments. Individual semantic memory networks were estimated using a Relatedness Judgment Task, yielding metrics that reflect integration (efficiency), local connectivity, and clustering.. Creative output was assessed via divergent thinking (AUT) and creative problem-solving (CPS) tasks, capturing both originality and usefulness, along with participants' subjective evaluations of their ideas. Findings reveal that semantic memory network properties predict objective creativity in task-specific ways. However, self-evaluations often diverged from actual performance, reflecting metacognitive biases influenced by heuristic cues such as fluency. Our findings underscore a dissociation between creative performance and self-evaluation, suggesting that creative performance and self-evaluation rely on partially distinct mechanisms, with semantic memory structure playing a different role in predicting objective output versus subjective judgments, depending on the task and creativity dimension. This work advances our understanding of the cognitive and metacognitive architecture underlying creative thinking.