How subjective idea valuation energizes and guides creative idea generation

What drives us to search for creative ideas and why does it feel good to find one? While previous studies demonstrated the positive influence of intrinsic motivation on creative abilities, how reward and subjective values play a role in creative mechanisms remains unknown. The existing framework for creativity investigation distinguishes generation and evaluation phases, and mostly aligns evaluation to cognitive control processes, without clarifying the mechanisms involved. This study proposes a new framework for creativity by 1) characterizing the role of individual preferences (how people value ideas) in creative ideation and 2) providing a computational model that implements three types of operations required for creative idea generation: knowledge exploration, candidate ideas valuation (attributing subjective values), and response selection. The findings first provide behavioral evidence demonstrating the involvement of valuation processes during idea generation: preferred ideas are provided faster. Second, valuation depends on the adequacy and originality of ideas and determines which ideas are selected. Finally, the proposed computational model correctly predicts the speed and quality of human creative responses, as well as interindividual differences in creative abilities. Altogether, this unprecedented model introduces the mechanistic role of valuation in creativity. It paves the way for a neurocomputational account of creativity mechanisms. Significance statement How creative ideas are generated remains poorly understood. Here, we introduce the role of subjective values (how much one likes an idea) in creative idea generation and explore it using behavioral experiments and computational modelling. We demonstrate that subjective values play a role in idea generation processes, and show how these values depend on idea adequacy and originality (two key creativity criteria). Next, we develop and validate behaviorally a computational model. The model first mimics semantic knowledge exploration, then assigns a subjective value to each idea explored, and finally selects a response according to its value. Our study provides a mechanistic model of creative processes which offers new perspectives for neuroimaging studies, creativity assessment, profiling, and targets for training programs.