Abstract
Creativity is pivotal to solving complex problems of many kinds, yet how cognitive flexibility dynamically supports creative processes is largely unexplored. Despite being a crucial multi-faceted contributor in creative thinking, cognitive flexibility, as typically assessed, does not fully capture how people adaptively shift between varying or persisting in their current problem-solving efforts. To fill this theoretical and methodological gap, we introduce a new operationalization of cognitive flexibility: the process-based Self-Guided Transition (SGT) measures, which assess when participants autonomously choose to continue working on one of two concurrently presented items (dwell length) and how often they choose to switch between the two items (shift count). We examine how these measures correlate with three diverse creativity tasks, and with creative performance on a more complex "garden design" task. Analyses of the relations between these new cognitive flexibility measures in 66 young adults revealed that SGT dwell length positively correlated with creative performance across several tasks. The SGT shift count positively correlated with within-task performance for a two-item choice task tapping divergent thinking (Alternative Uses Task) but not for a two-item choice task calling on convergent thinking (Anagram task). Multiple regression analyses revealed that, taken together, both the shift count and dwell length measures from the Alternative Uses Task explained a significant proportion of variance in measures of fluency, and originality, on a composite measure of the three independently-assessed creative tasks. Relations of SGTs to the Garden Design task were weaker, though shift count on the Alternative Uses Task was predictive of a composite measure of overall Garden Design quality. Taken together, these results highlight the promise of our new process-based measures to better chart the dynamically flexible processes supporting creative thinking and action.
Highlights
Adaptive creative problem-solving requires dynamic integration of multiple sources of motivational, cognitive, and perceptual information relating to our goals and task progress
We hypothesized that self-guided transitions would predominantly reflect participants’ receptive attunement to their own unfolding progress toward their task goals [26, 29, 33, 34], signaling whether they should persist in their current direction, or instead take an alternative route, indicative of flexible cognitive control, and so would be beneficial to creative performance
Within the Alternative Uses Task (AUT) or Anagram tasks, how were shift count and dwell length related to one another? And did participants who relatively frequently switched from one task item to the other task item on the loosely structured AUT, show a similar tendency on the more structured Anagram task? Paralleling findings from many analogous studies that used contentbased measures of shifting and clustering/dwelling, it can be seen from Table 4 that, within the AUT task, there is a moderately strong negative correlation (r = –.58) between the shift count and dwell length measures
Summary
Adaptive creative problem-solving requires dynamic integration of multiple sources of motivational, cognitive, and perceptual information relating to our goals and task progress. Little is known about how we dynamically exercise the flexible cognitive control that allows us to adaptively shift from doggedly pursuing our current path to newly exploring alternative routes, and how this shapes our creative thinking and action. In all of these tasks, to allow for maximal experimental control, the problem space is narrowly defined and tightly structured, with alternative task stimuli or task rules that would not typically be juxtaposed in daily tasks. These tasks largely lack generalizability to everyday complex problem solving
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