Psychology

The Uses of Objects Task is a widely used creativity test. The test is usually scored by humans, which introduces subjectivity and individual variance into creativity scores. Here, we present a new computational method for scoring creativity: Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a tool used to measure semantic distance between words. 33 participants provided creative uses for 20 separate objects. We compared both human judges and LSA scores and found that LSA methods produced a better model of the underlying semantic originality of responses than traditional measures.