Remote Association Strength
topic
Remote association strength is the capacity to perceive meaningful connections between concepts that are widely separated in semantic space — the mental distance between the connected concepts being the measure of the connection's originality, with the most creative insights characteristically involving the connection of concepts whose semantic distance is so great that most minds would never activate them simultaneously.
Role
Sarnoff Mednick's Remote Associates Test (RAT) was developed specifically to measure remote association ability as a proxy for creative thinking — based on the model that creative thinking consists precisely in the formation of associative links between elements distant in associative space. Research using fMRI during creative insight tasks consistently shows that the 'aha' moment of creative insight is associated with a sudden increase in activity across widely distributed brain networks — the neural signature of a remote association being formed that links regions of semantic space not previously connected in the thinker's mental network.