تفاوت‌های شخصیتی و فردی اثرات افتراقی بازداری شناختی و هوش روی خلاقیت

There are different conceptions about how cognitive inhibition is related to creativity. Creativity has either been associated with effective inhibition, or with disinhibition, or with an adaptive engagement of inhibition. In this study, we examined the relationship of cognitive inhibition, assessed by means of the random motor generation task, with different measures of creativity. We also analyzed whether this relation is mediated by intelligence. We generally found a positive correlation of inhibition and creativity measures. Moreover, latent variable analyses indicate that inhibition may primarily promote the fluency of ideas, whereas intelligence specifically promotes the originality of ideas. These findings support the notion that creative thought involves executive processes and may help to better understand the differential role of inhibition and intelligence in creativity.

At the heart of every conception of creativity stands the creation of new ideas. Research, therefore, targets at a better understanding of the cognitive processes involved in creative ideation. Gilhooly, Fioratou, Anthony, and Wynn (2007) performed a detailed analysis of the alternate uses task and found that the fluent production of new uses was predicted by the “executively loading task” letter fluency, while the production of familiar uses (i.e., retrieved from long-term memory rather than created during the task) was not. They assumed that people with higher executive capacity may find it easier to inhibit dominant responses and switch strategies or categories. In a similar vein, Nusbaum and Silvia (2011) showed that fluid intelligence predicts higher switching of categories during an idea generation task, which corresponds to high divergent thinking performance. A study by Benedek, Könen, and Neubauer (in press) showed that creativity is substantially predicted by the abilities of dissociation and associative combination. This suggests that the generation of creative ideas requires fluent generation and combination of mutually remote associative elements (Mednick, 1962). At this, it was hypothesized that dissociation ability may reflect an indicator of semantic inhibition facilitating the fluent access to new and remote concepts. These findings suggest that creative ability is related to executive functioning. Some other studies have addressed this issue by using explicit tests of executive function and specifically with tests of cognitive inhibition. Golden (1975) reports that, in a study involving high school students, high performance in the color-word Stroop task (i.e., a classic measure of cognitive inhibition which requires to name the font color of words which can be incongruent to the word meaning) was positively related to divergent thinking performance and to teacher ratings of students’ creativity. Similar evidence was obtained by Groborz and Nęcka (2003), who showed that creativity assessed by divergent figural production was related to higher cognitive control as indexed by the Stroop and the Navon task (i.e., a task which requires to focus either on local or global features of a stimulus and to inhibit incongruent features). However, not all studies find support for a positive relation of creativity and cognitive inhibition. Some studies report no correlation of creativity and cognitive inhibition (Burch et al., 2006, Green and Williams, 1999 and Stavridou and Furnham, 1996). And more interestingly, there also exists the opposite view that “creative people are characterized by a lack of both cognitive and behavioral inhibition” (Martindale, 1999, p. 143; see also, Eysenck, 1995). This notion may stem from the general observation that creative people are usually characterized by high ideational fluency, high associative fluency (Benedek et al., in press and Mednick et al., 1964), and are associated with increased impulsivity (Burch et al., 2006 and Schuldenberg, 2000). Empirical evidence for this notion comes from a study showing that high creative achievers were found to show decreased latent inhibition as compared to low creative achievers (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2003). As a third perspective, creativity has been related to differential or flexible engagement of inhibition. It was shown that creative people show slower responses in tasks requiring inhibition of interfering information, but faster responses in tasks without interference (Dorfman et al., 2008, Kwiatkowski et al., 1999 and Vartanian et al., 2007). These findings have been interpreted in terms of a differential focusing of attention; that is, creative people may be able to focus or defocus attention depending on task demands. In a similar vein, Zabelina and Robinson (2010) found that divergent thinking and creative achievement were not generally related to inhibition as measured by the common Stroop effect, but rather to a more flexible trial-to-trial modulation of cognitive control. Hence, although there is increasing evidence that creativity is related to cognitive inhibition, this evidence appears to be conflicting, either associating creativity with high cognitive inhibition, with cognitive disinhibition, or an adaptive cognitive control. It should also be noted that most studies on creativity and inhibition so far have not considered the role of intelligence. Executive functions such as cognitive inhibition are commonly conceived to reflect essential cognitive processes underlying general intelligence (e.g., Arffa, 2007). Moreover, intelligence shows a moderate but consistent relationship with creativity (e.g., Kim, 2005), and there is an increasing understanding on how intelligence may facilitate creative thought (Nusbaum and Silvia, 2011 and Silvia, in press). Taken together, intelligence may qualify as a mediator of the inhibition-creativity relationship. The first main aim of this study is to examine the correlation of cognitive inhibition and creativity and see whether it is consistent for different indicators of creativity. Since inhibition as defined above is related to cognitive flexibility and non-perseverative behavior, we hypothesize that there generally should be a positive correlation. The second main aim of this study is to examine whether the relation of creativity and inhibition is mediated by intelligence. Analyses shall be performed at latent level in order to estimate the correlations devoid of the influence of measurement error.