Abstract
In today’s world of rapid changes and increasing complexity, understanding and enhancing creativity is of critical importance. Studies investigating EEG correlates of creativity linked power in the alpha frequency band to creativity, and alpha-power has been interpreted as reflecting attention on internal mental representations and inhibition of external sensory input. Thus far, however, there is no direct evidence for the idea that internally directed attention facilitates creativity. The aim of the current study was to experimentally investigate the relationship between eye-closure—a simple and effective means to stimulate internally directed attention—and creativity. Moreover, to test whether the potential beneficial effect of eye-closure is specific for creativity, or whether it improves general cognitive functioning, the current study tested the effect of eye-closure on creativity and on working memory (WM). Participants completed four tasks to measure divergent and convergent creativity (Adapted Alternative Uses (AAU) Test, Remote Associates Test (RAT), Sentence Construction Test, and Word Construction Test), and one task to measure WM (Digit Span Test). For each task, participants had to perform two versions, one version with eyes open and one version with eyes closed. Eye-closure facilitated creative performance on the classical divergent and convergent creativity tasks (AAU Test and RAT). No effect of eye-closure was observed on the WM task. These findings provide a novel and easily applicable means to enhance divergent and convergent creativity through eye-closure.
Highlights
Creative thinking is one of the most important cognitive skills in our fast-changing world (Ananiadou et al, 2009)—it allows us to remain flexible, and provides us with the capacity to deal with the opportunities and challenges that are part of our dynamic environment (Ritter and Mostert, 2017)
The validity of the Alternative Uses (AAU) task was confirmed by the correlation with both the cognitive flexibility (p = 0.001) and the originality (p = 0.001) dimension of the original Alternative Uses Test (AUT)
The flexibility dimension of the AUT was positively correlated with the Remote Associates Test (RAT) (p = 0.047), and the originality dimension of the AUT was correlated to the Sentence Construction (SC) test (p = 0.002) and the Word Construction (WC) test (p = 0.042)
Summary
Creative thinking is one of the most important cognitive skills in our fast-changing world (Ananiadou et al, 2009)—it allows us to remain flexible, and provides us with the capacity to deal with the opportunities and challenges that are part of our dynamic environment (Ritter and Mostert, 2017). In recent years, increasing insights have been gained into how creative ideas arise in the brain. Creativity is found to be strongly associated with alpha oscillations in frontal and posterior parietal brain regions (see review in Fink and Benedek, 2014). Alpha oscillations are hypothesized to protect internal mental processes supporting creative thought from distracting external sensory information that may interfere with the creative process (Cooper et al, 2003). The current study tested the hypothesis that excluding external information through eye-closure will benefit creativity
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