The Roles of Memory and Imagination in Evaluating Usefulness of Novel Ideas

Episodic retrieval processes that support reconstructing past experiences and imagining future experiences have been linked to creative idea generation. However, little is known about the possible role of such episodic processes in the evaluation of creative ideas. Across two independent samples, participants rated the effectiveness of pregenerated object‐use pairs and subsequently reported the extent to which they relied on memory and imagination during their evaluations. Using preregistered ordinal logistic mixed‐effects models, we found consistent patterns: typical uses were associated with greater reliance on memory, while novel uses prompted greater reliance on imagination. These effects were robust across both the Prolific sample ( n  = 50) and the larger DLABSS sample ( n  = 623), with large effect sizes in both studies. These findings support the idea that distinct types of episodic processes are recruited depending on the familiarity and novelty of the stimuli, suggesting a functional dissociation between memory and imagination in evaluative processes.