JESSICA COCKBAIN MICHAEL O. VERTOLLI JIM DAVIES Creative Imagination is Stable Across Technological Media: The Spore Creature Creator Versus Pencil and Paper ABSTRACT T. B. Ward (1994) investigated creativity by asking participants to draw alien creatures that they imagined to be from a planet very different from Earth. He found that participant drawings reliably contained features typical of common Earth animals. As a consequence, Ward concluded that creativity is structured. The present investigation predicts that this limitation on creativity is not restricted to drawings: the use of different technology will not change creative output. To investigate this question, participants performed Ward’s task twice: once using pencil and paper and once using software made to design creatures (the Spore Creature Creator). Only minor significant differences were found. This preliminarily suggests that changing tools does not affect the overall rigidity of the creative process. This lends further support to Ward’s thesis on the structural rigidity of creativity. We conclude by suggesting an elaboration to Ward’s thesis that will be explored in future work. We suggest that aesthetics might be one of the factors that contribute to creative constraint, in that creatures that are too unusual would be less interesting. Keywords: creativity, cognition. Creativity is a revered and desired attribute in many cultures (Rudowicz, Tokarz, & Beauvale, 2009). This comes as no surprise when one considers that famous intellectu- als across many domains (e.g., Einstein in physics, Picasso in art, and Tchaikovsky in music) are often regarded as having had incredible creative ability. Given the impor- tance of this attribute, investigating ways in which our creativity can be enhanced has great potential benefits for society (e.g., improving the economy [Candy, 2000]) in addition to contributing generally to the scientific understanding of the phenomenon. As new technological media are introduced, it is worthwhile to consider whether media creation tools can influence human creativity. Although the term is widely used in both academic and non-academic settings, the meaning of “creativity” is ambiguous. Most definitions require elements of 13 The Journal of Creative Behavior, Vol. 48, Iss. 1, pp. 13–24 © 2013 by the Creative Education Foundation, Inc. Ó DOI: 10.1002/jocb.38