From Co-Occurrence to Creativity: Language Statistics Support Speed and Accuracy In All Forms of the Remote Associates Test

The Remote Associate Test (RAT) of creative thinking ostensibly relies on linguistic association in its compound form (CRAT) but not its functional form (FRAT). Across three experiments (N=80, 80, 60), we found linguistic co-occurrence measures predicted RAT, CRAT, and FRAT performance, supporting the importance of linguistic distributional knowledge in cognition.