A new study published in npj Science of Learning provides evidence that creative thinking may help students remember new information, such as foreign language vocabulary, by boosting their ability to form meaningful mental connections. The research suggests that the cognitive process of making novel associations—called associative thinking—helps explain why people with high creativity tend to perform better on learning tasks.
Creativity is often considered essential in education and professional life. Past research has shown that creativity is positively linked to academic achievement. However, less is known about how creativity actually supports learning at the cognitive level. The authors of the new study proposed that associative thinking might play a key role. This is the ability to connect different ideas or concepts, which is often seen as a hallmark of creative thought. They suspected that this same ability could also help people learn, particularly when it comes to tasks that require forming new associations, like matching a foreign word with its English translation.
Despite the theoretical connection, no previous research had directly tested whether associative thinking is the link between creativity and learning. The researchers aimed to fill this gap by testing whether students who show higher levels of associative thinking also do better at learning tasks. They also wanted to see whether this effect holds even when controlling for general intelligence, which is known to influence both learning and creativity.
“Creativity has often been linked to academic learning, yet little is known about the mechanisms underlying their relationship,” said study author Simone Luchini, a PhD student at Penn State University and an incoming postdoctoral researcher at the Paris Brain Institute. “In our work, we wanted to explore if associative thinking could underlie this link. Associative thinking involves connecting distant concepts or ideas in memory. For example, the concepts of ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ are highly related, while ‘dog’ and ‘plane’ are less related. Does the ability to generate these distant connections allow creative individuals to learn better?”
To explore these questions, the researchers conducted two studies with undergraduate students. In both, participants completed a language learning task that required them to memorize pairs of Lithuanian and English words. They were then tested on how well they remembered the word pairs after 24 hours.
In the first study, 146 students completed the language learning task and a word association test that measured associative thinking. In this test, they were shown a series of nouns and asked to come up with verbs that were meaningfully connected but not commonly linked with the noun. For example, given the word “boot,” a creative response might be “travel” instead of a more typical response like “wear.” These responses were analyzed using a computational model that scores how semantically distant the noun-verb pair is. The greater the semantic distance, the more novel the association.
The results showed that students who generated more semantically distant associations recalled more word pairs, both immediately and after a 24-hour delay. This held true even after accounting for their scores on tests of fluid and crystallized intelligence. These findings suggest that associative thinking plays a distinct role in learning beyond general mental ability.
The second study included 145 new participants and extended the investigation in several ways. In addition to the language learning and word association tasks, students also completed creative tasks, such as writing short stories and drawing sketches. These tasks were scored using automated systems that assess the novelty and integration of ideas in text and images. The researchers again found that students who performed better on the associative thinking task recalled more words after 24 hours.
Importantly, the second study distinguished between two kinds of associations: free association, where participants responded with any related verb that came to mind, and goal-directed association, where they were instructed to think creatively and produce more novel connections. The researchers found that only goal-directed associative thinking predicted learning outcomes. This suggests that intentional creative thinking is more relevant for learning than simply making quick or obvious connections.
They also looked at whether creativity influenced learning through associative thinking. Statistical modeling showed that associative thinking partly explained the link between creativity (measured by the drawing and writing tasks and personality measures related to openness) and learning. When they controlled for intelligence, the data indicated that associative thinking fully accounted for the relationship between creativity and learning. In other words, creativity helped learning primarily through the ability to form distant, meaningful associations.
“We find that associative thinking mediates the link between creativity and learning,” Luchini told PsyPost. “In other words, how good a person is at connecting these distant concepts in memory determines whether their creativity can translate into better learning.”
The findings also point to a distinction between spontaneous associations and more deliberate creative thinking. While people can often make quick associations without much effort, it is the more thoughtful, inventive connections that appear to help with memory and learning. This may have implications for education, suggesting that encouraging students to think in more creative and flexible ways could improve their ability to retain new information.
While the study provides new insight into how creativity supports learning, it comes with some limitations. The research relied on a specific type of learning task—memorizing foreign vocabulary—which may not represent all forms of learning. It is unclear whether the same findings would apply to learning in other areas, such as math, science, or visual-spatial tasks.
The study also used a college student sample from psychology courses, which may limit how widely the results can be applied. Future studies could test whether the findings hold in other age groups, educational settings, or cultural contexts.
“Our study was conducted online, so we want to extend our research to a more realistic setting by testing students in their classrooms,” Luchini noted. “We hope that our work will inform classroom practices. This kind of research can be used to facilitate learning, by treating each student as an individual with their own strengths and weaknesses.”
The authors also suggest that future studies explore the neural basis of these effects. Understanding the brain mechanisms involved in associative thinking could help explain why some people are better at learning through creativity than others.
“To clarify, we think of creativity as a standard measure of individual differences, much like intelligence or personality,” Luchini explained. “While creativity is certainly malleable, there is a stable degree of creative ability that we capture with our psychological tests, which then informs our research questions.”
The study, “Creativity supports learning through associative thinking,” was authored by Simone A. Luchini, James C. Kaufman, Benjamin Goecke, Oliver Wilhelm, Yoed N. Kenett, Daisy Lei, Mathias Benedek, Janet G. van Hell, and Roger E. Beaty.
