The Divergent Association Task (DAT), published in July 2021, is a psychological test designed to measure a person's

creativity Creativity is the ability to form novel and valuable Idea, ideas or works using one's imagination. Products of creativity may be intangible (e.g. an idea, scientific theory, Literature, literary work, musical composition, or joke), or a physica ...

. The task involves naming ten nouns that differ as much as possible from each other. Here, the difference between two terms is understood in the

semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

sense and is calculated by a special algorithm. The test specifically measures a component of creativity called

divergent thinking Divergent thinking is a thought process used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. It typically occurs in a spontaneous, free-flowing, "non-linear" manner, such that many ideas are generated in an emergent cognitive fa ...

, which is the ability to find different solutions to open-ended problems. There is an online version of the taskOnline DAT
/ref> created by the authors who developed the DAT (Jay A. Olson, Johnny Nahas, Denis Chmoulevitch, Simon J. Cropper, Margaret E. Webb).

References

Further reading