An eye-tracking study of the Russian language compound Remote Associates Test problem solving | Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Filologiya – Tomsk State University Journal of Philology. 2025. № 95. DOI: 10.17223/19986645/95/2

An eye-tracking study of the Russian language compound Remote Associates Test problem solving

One of the most widely used tools for measuring convergent thinking is the Remote Association Test (RAT), originally proposed by S. Mednick in accordance with his associative theory of creativity. In a pilot experiment, we studied the oculomotor activity of Russian speaking participants (n=20), who performed the Russian language Compound Remote Associates test in order to identify oculomotor predictors of involvement in the creative process during problem solving. Using linear mixed-effects models for oculomotor data and linguistic characteristics of the stimuli, two significant fixed effects (average compound Zipf-word frequency and number of blinks per second) on increasing the probability of correct response in RAT tasks were found, which is probably related to internal attention involvement while controlling the linguistic factor of the frequency of words-associates that the test participant processes. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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Keywords

eye tracking, remote associates test, creativity, convergent thinking, blinking, word frequency, Zipf value

Authors

Name	Organization	E-mail
Vlasov Mikhail S.	Altai State Pedagogical University	vlasov_mikhailo@mail.ru
Repeykova Vlada A.	National Research University Higher School of Economics	repej.ru@mail.ru
Sychev Oleg A.	Altai State Pedagogical University; Federal Scientific Center for Psychological and Interdisciplinary Research; Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis	osn1@mail.ru
Toropchina Olga V.	Altai State Pedagogical University	olatoro@mail.ru

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