Creative Thinking And Cognitive Inhibition: Mechanism And Factors

Do creative people exhibit higher cognitive inhibition? Whether the ability of cognitive inhibition of creative people more flexible? What are the factors that affect it? Recently, the study of the relationship between creative thinking and cognitive inhibition is an active research field. Researchers have developed different types of creativity models to explain the cognitive inhibition process of creative people. However, they did not come to the same conclusion. This research use three paradigms, and explore from many aspects on the differences of the ability of cognitive inhibition between creative and no creative people and the role of time pressure situation and emotional state.This research consists of three studies, and six experiments were carried out. In Study1and2, Using Stroop task to examine the factors and effects between creative thinking and cognitive inhibition. In Study3, Using eye tracking paradigm to investigate the differences in inhibiting not proper meaning of ambiguous words between creative people and non creative people, and analyzing the role of context. The details and main findings are as described as follows.In Study1, there are two experiments. The creative people and non creative people were selected by TTCT. In Experiment1and2, cognitive inhibition and its flexibility were measured by Stroop color naming task, individuals were asked to categorize the color of presented characters as either green or red of a keyboard. We coded in terms of whether they involved congruent or incongruent trails. In Experiment2, to assess individual differences in flexible cognitive control, we coded trails in terms of whether they involved congruent or incongruent targets (i.e., on trail n) and followed congruent or incongruent primes on the previous (i.e., n-1) trail.In Study2, two experiments were included. This study used color-word Stroop task and aimed to explore the role of time pressure situation and emotional state on the relationship between creative thinking and cognitive inhibition between creative people and non creative people. In Experiment3, Chinese character denoting blue, red and green were presented, and subjects were instructed to respond to the word (word target condition) and colors of stimuli (color target condition), and subjects were divided into two groups. In one group, Time pressure situation was applied, and the other group was not applied. In Experiment4, subjects were induced happy and sad emotional state by different movie clips, and then investigated the differences of cognitive inhibition between creative people and non creative people.In Study3, sentence reading tasks were used to further examine the cognitive inhibition of creative people. In Experiment5, ambiguous words with two characters were selected and made a sentence as experimental condition, and matched it with a controlled condition. In Experiment6, ambiguous sentences were selected as materials, and the presentation condition concluded two contexts. The eye movement measures first run fixation duration, first run dwell time, fixation duration and fixation counts, etc, in order to examine the role of context in affecting the cognitive inhibition of creative people or non creative people.To summarize the experiment results of the three studies, we could conclude as follows.(1) Compared to non creative people, the cognitive inhibition of creative people were higher and more flexibly.(2) Time pressure situation facilitated the cognitive inhibition ability of creative people. Under the control of time pressure situation, the cognitive inhibition of creative people were higher than those of non creative people, but under no time pressure situation, there was no significant difference on the ability of cognitive inhibition between creative people and non creative people.(3) non creative people were more sensitive to time pressure situation. Under the time pressure situation, the sympathetic nervous system of non creative people were strengthened significantly.(4) Emotional state affected individuals’ cognitive inhibition. Under the control of happy emotional state, the cognitive inhibition of creative people were higher than those of non creative people, but under the control of sad emotional state, there was no significant difference on the ability of cognitive inhibition between creative people and non creative people.(5) Under happy emotional state, the intensity of sympathetic nervous system of creative people was higher than those of non creative people when they were completing word naming task and color naming task, but under sad emotional state, the intensity of parasympathetic nervous system of creative people was higher than those of non creative people.(6) There was no significant difference on inhibiting improper meanings between creative people and non creative people;(7) Compared to non creative people, when the context was in the front of ambiguous sentence, the ability of cognitive inhibition creative people were higher than those of non creative people, but when the context was at the last of ambiguous sentence, there was no significant difference on the ability of cognitive inhibition between creative people and non creative people.To sum up, the cognitive inhibition ability of creative people was higher than those of non creative people, and showed greater cognitive flexibility; the relationship between creative thinking and cognitive inhibition was moderated by emotional state, time pressure situation and context.