Original title: Understanding Creativity in Human–AI Collaboration: How Cognitive Strategies and Student Profiles Relate to Students’ Creativity
Kim van Broekhoven, Marian Hickendorff · September 2026
Generative Artificial Intelligence, or GenAI, is changing how college students solve problems, but we need to know how working with it affects creativity. Creativity here means how original and high-quality ideas are. Researchers studied how students think when using GenAI and tracked which strategies led to the most creative outcomes. They found six thinking strategies in total. The way it works depends on how deeply students process information. Students who used constructive strategies—like blending concepts or exploring word meanings—came up with much more original ideas than those using simpler, active methods like relying on personal experience. Researchers also grouped students into four collaborator types. These groups scored similarly on idea originality, but their idea quality differed. Students who leaned into GenAI produced higher quality ideas than largely independent thinkers. Overall, how students choose to think alongside AI directly shapes their creative results.
Imagine you are baking a cake with a friend who has all the recipes. If you just ask them for the recipe and follow it exactly, you get a standard cake. If you ask them to combine two different recipes, you might create something new and surprising. But the cake's taste—its quality—depends more on your own skills than on how you asked. In this paper, the AI is like the friend with recipes, and the cognitive strategies are different ways of asking. The study found that asking to combine recipes leads to more original cakes, but the quality of the cake does not depend on how you asked.
For students using AI tools like ChatGPT to generate ideas, this study shows that how they engage matters more than just using the tool. Simply asking AI for answers leads to less original ideas than actively combining concepts with AI. Educators can guide students toward constructive strategies to boost creativity, especially originality.
The abstract doesn't say, but the study is observational with 146 undergraduates in a lab, so results may not generalize to other settings or populations. Creativity was measured only as originality and quality, not other dimensions like feasibility or novelty. The study cannot prove causation between strategies and creativity.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
Understanding Creativity in Human–AI Collaboration: How Cognitive Strategies and Student Profiles Relate to Students’ Creativity — Kim van Broekhoven, Marian Hickendorff — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/6p3fn_v2
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.