The Relationship Between Executive Function And College Students’ Creativity

Executive functions are a series of goal-oriented top-down higher cognitive structures that play an important role in an individual’s quality of life,work achievement,and well-being,and are one of the indispensable cognitive functions in individual development.Creativity is the highest form and core of individual human abilities and plays an important role in technological progress,social and behavioral sciences,humanities,and artistic creation.Previous studies have explored the relationship between executive functions and creativity,but other individual factors(personality dispositions,thinking skills)have been less explored.The present study examined the predictive role of executive function and its subcomponents on creativity,the mediating role of creative personality,and the moderating role of relational thinking.One hundred and fifty college students were used as subjects and were assessed using the Vienna Test System,the Sample Relational Matching Task,the Williams Creative Personality Disposition Inventory,and the Creative Thinking Skills Test of Typical Behavior.The results of the study were as follows:(1)There was a significant positive correlation between an individual’s level of executive functioning and creativity,and it was able to positively predict his or her level of creativity.Inhibitory control,working memory,and cognitive flexibility were all significantly and positively correlated with creativity and predicted creativity separately,and there was no significant difference between the weight of inhibitory control and working memory and cognitive flexibility.(2)Individual creative personality partially mediates the relationship between executive function and creativity,and executive function can influence creativity through the executive function-creative personality-creativity pathway.Relational thinking moderates the first half of the mediation model,i.e.,the pathway of executive function on individual creative personality,as the level of relational thinking increases,the predictive effect of executive function on individual creative personality decreases.The study also explored the explanatory role of executive function and its subcomponents on creativity,and explored the relationship between executive function and creative personality tendencies as a separate variable,revealing the mediating and moderating role of creative personality and relational thinking,and providing more explanatory paths for the influence mechanism of creativity in college students.