0071 Individual Differences in Sleep Duration and Creative Thinking on the Remote Associates Test

Abstract

Abstract Introduction Short sleep has been shown to affect attention, processing speed, and memory. Creative cognition, including convergent thinking (e.g., identifying remote connections), has received less attention in the sleep literature. In four studies, we examined individual differences in sleep duration relative to performance on a convergent thinking task in which participants view three words (sore-should-sweat) and have to identify a target word that connects them (cold). Based on the literature on sleep deprivation and attention/memory, we hypothesized that short sleepers would show lower convergent thinking performance. By contrast, based on the view that convergent thinking is reflective of fluid intelligence—a higher-order cognitive construct that is resilient to sleep deprivation—short sleep should be unrelated to convergent thinking performance. Methods Participants were 551 adults aged 18-30 who were recruited across four experiments. Each experiment compared performance on a traditional 3-item compound Remote Associates Test to performance on a modified approach that provided additional semantic information (4-item Remote-Associates Test). After each experiment, participants were asked to indicate the duration of their previous night of sleep. Results Participants performed 27% better on the 4-item version, relative to the traditional 3-item Remote Associates Test (p<.001). There were no statistically significant associations between sleep duration and performance accuracy on the 3-item or 4-item compound Remote Associates Tests (rs<.10, ps > .05). This pattern was observed within each experiment, as well as when the data were collapsed across experiments. In addition, there were no significant associations when comparing extreme sleep durations (< 5 hours to ≥8 hours; all ps > .05). Conclusion Individual differences in recent sleep duration were not related to individual differences in convergent thinking abilities. These findings are consistent with the view of convergent thinking as a marker of fluid intelligence. Experimental work is needed to determine whether convergent thinking is fully resistant to sleep deprivation and to examine generalizability to other creative processes (e.g., divergent thinking, imagination). Support (if any) National Science Foundation (1920730)