A New Test for Assessing Creative Flexibility of Perceptual Interpretation: The Figural Interpretation Quest

Perceptual flexibility—adopting varied construals and perspectives of ambiguous shapes or forms—has long been recognized by artists and designers as a source of creative inspiration. Despite this, the ways in which perceptual flexibility contributes to creative thought and making has only sporadically been empirically examined by researchers. To address this gap, this study offers a schematic framework that integrates apparently disparate concepts such as representational restructuring (“seeing as”), conceptual connectivity, and openness to experience as interrelated constructs that collectively shape the flexibility of perceptual interpretation. Guided by this framework, a new measure of perceptual flexibility (the Figural Interpretation Quest, or FIQ) is systematically assessed to evaluate its relations to creative ideation and innovative problem solving. Across six experiments, ambiguous irregular shapes of various colorswere visually presented tomore than 550 participants, and the originality and flexibility of participants’ interpretations of those shapes were compared with their performance on creative thinking, design, and individual difference measures. As hypothesized, originality scores on the FIQ significantly positively correlated with originality on lab-based assessments of divergent thinking—encompassing several predominantly conceptual tasks and a predominantly perceptual task. Further demonstrating construct validity, FIQ originality and FIQ flexibility significantly positively correlated with multiple measures of openness to experience, and with creative performance on two open-ended product ideation tasks. The FIQ offers a novel assessment of perceptual flexibility, opening new opportunities for systematically deepening our empirical and theoretical understanding of how ambiguity stimulates creative ideation at the dynamic intersections of perceptual and conceptual exploration.