We're going to leave the podcast studio and travel to Yale University for the 2025 creativity research conference! This episode has six interviews with leading-edge creativity researchers and the next episode has five more. There were over two hundred researchers at Yale, from around the world, including Japan, India, Europe, and South America. This is the official American Psychological Association creativity research conference. In this episode, you'll hear about research that is SO NEW that it hasn't even been published yet. Top creativity researchers attend this conference each year so that they can find out about the latest research findings, and now you can hear about it, too. This episode takes you to the conference room floor. Listen to this episode and the next one, because there is too much great research for just one episode! Dr. Sawyer invited six researchers to tell us about their latest research findings, and there are five more in the next episode.

Chapters

1:49 Conference welcome from Roni Reiter-Palmon

2:49 Kristin Lamb: Imagination and Creativity

9:40 Ahmad Rahimi: Using Large Language Models to Assess Student Creativity with Games

13:43 Interlude

14:41 Shoshi Kesari: Improv Theater with Adults

20:34 Denis Dumas: Children and the balance between originality and appropriateness

31:15 Michael Mumford: Creativity research from the 1970s to today

42:11 Outro

43:19 Closer

Resources

Conference web site

Conference detailed schedule of presentations

Music by license from SoundStripe:

"Uptown Lovers Instrumental" by AFTERNOONZ
"Miss Missy" by AFTERNOONZ
"What's the Big Deal" by Ryan Saranich

The 2025 Creativity Conference: Cutting-Edge Research from Top Psychologists