2.6.2. Remote Association Task (RAT)
An adapted Chinese version of the Remote Association Task (RAT) was
implemented to assess convergent thinking (Duan et al., 2020). During
the task, participants were presented with three Chinese characters and
were asked to generate a Chinese character that could combine with each
of the shown three characters to produce a reasonable word. For example,
one of the RAT questions was: “board, hole, color”, and the answer is:
“black” which can be combined into “blackboard, black hole, and black
color”. Each question was randomly presented for a maximum of 20 s.
Once the participant figured out the answer, he or she could immediately
press the keyboard (space key) to report it. The pre-test and post-test
contained 20 different item groups with solution rates ranging from 40%
to 65%. To prevent interference at the linguistic level, all of the
words were chosen from the Modern Chinese Frequency Dictionary (1989).
Previous research has found that the revised RAT has adequate internal
consistency.