The relationship between visual creativity and visual mental imagery in ageing

Creativity appears to be a multifaceted phenomenon involving both cognitive (e.g., mental imagery, attention, memory, etc.) and extra-cognitive components (emotions, unconscious processes). Recently creativity has also been considered as an alternative approach to foster active ageing. In this study the relationships between visual creativity and visual mental imagery components were investigated in a sample of 100 people with no background in art, design and architecture, aged from 18 to 82 years. Participants were administered an adaptation of Clark’s Drawing Ability Test, aimed at measuring the ability to produce creative drawings, and three mental imagery tasks investigating the three main cognitive processes involved in visual mental imagery in accordance with Kosslyn’s Model: generation, inspection and transformation. Vividness of imagery was also measured. Drawings were evaluated by two independent judges in terms of ‘aesthetic’ and ‘creativity’ values. Correlation analysis revealed that the ability to make aesthetic and creative drawings is related to the ability to generate and accurately transform mental images. Regression analysis confirmed the key role of spatial imagery and also highlighted that the vividness of imagery is crucial. These results confirm and extend previous findings in which artistic creativity in professionals and trained subjects was found to be related to the generation process of imagery rather than to the transformation process of imagery, whereas creativity assessed by means of different tasks in novices was related to different processes of mental imagery (e.g., generation and transformation). This suggests that imagery is important for visual creativity. In addition, with regards the ageing issue, it should be noted that no difference was found between younger and older participants, confirming that creativity can be preserved to some extent with age and suggesting the importance of implementing creativity training aimed at preventing pathological ageing. © 2016 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved