The relationship between cognitive inhibition, working memory capacity with different creativity measures
Date Issued
2006
Date
2006
Author(s)
Lin, Wei-Lun
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
One of the problems in creativity research was that researchers didn’t distinguish “high creatives” from different source of creativity measures. In this article, I pointed out that widely-used divergent thinking tests were different from the creative problem solving process, and tested the different relationship between them with some cognitive factors: cognitive inhibition and working memory capacity. Eysenck (1995) hypothesized that reduced cognitive inhibition could increase the amount of encoding of external information, change the structure of knowledge representation, hence promote creativity performance. But he not only failed to distinguish different creativity, nor he considered the possible role of working memory capacity in the process of changing knowledge representation. According to past evidence, I proposed two hypotheses: (1) Reduced cognitive inhibition could increase the amount of retrieving of irrelevant internal information, therefore match the novelty and quantity requirement of divergent thinking tests. However, this irrelevant information would not fit the consideration of appropriateness in creative problem solving. (2) Working memory capacity played a restricting role in information processing, therefore had a key effect in the process of changing knowledge representation and solving creative problems.
Exp.1 tested the relationship between two kinds of creativity with cognitive inhibition from the individual difference perspective. Exp.2 used another creative problem to replicate the above results. The results showed that subjects performed well in the divergent thinking test showed lower level of cognitive inhibition functioning in two measures of cognitive inhibition. On the other hand, subjects performed well in creative problem solving showed the same level of cognitive inhibition functioning with less creative ones. Exp.3 used the “dual task” method to test the effects working memory capacity on two creativity tasks. The results showed that this manipulation significantly increased the performance of ordinary subjects in the divergent thinking test, but hindered creative problem solving performance. Exp.4 tested the relationship between cognitive inhibition level, working memory capacity, the structure of knowledge representation and two kinds of creativity all together. The results showed that divergent thinking ability was only negatively correlated with cognitive inhibition. On the other hand, the performance of creative problem solving was correlated with working memory capacity and the structure of knowledge representation, but not with cognitive inhibition. It was concluded that divergent thinking ability was affected by cognitive inhibition, while creative problem solving ability was more constrained by working memory capacity. Two kinds of creativity measures had different relationship with cognitive inhibition and working memory capacity.
Subjects
divergent thinking
creative problem solving
cognitive inhibition
working memory capacity
2-4-6 problem
Type
other
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