Implicit Theories, Working Memory, and Cognitive Load: Impacts on Creative Thinking

Jenni L Redifer,Christine L Bae,Morgan Debusk-Lane

doi:10.1177/2158244019835919

Jenni L Redifer, Christine L Bae + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019835919

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Abstract

Creative thinking shares many characteristics with traditional complex tasks. We investigated whether implicit theories of creativity would affect creative thinking in a way similar to the impact of implicit theories of intelligence on academic tasks. We altered participants’ theories of creativity to be either more incremental or more entity-like. We also examined the impact of working memory (WM) and cognitive load on creative thinking. Cognitive load fully mediated the relationship between implicit theories and creative thinking, with more incremental beliefs linked to lower cognitive load. In addition, cognitive load partially mediated the relationship between WM and creative thinking. Our results support prior research showing that creative thinking draws on cognitive mechanisms similar to those utilized by other complex tasks, but the impact of implicit theories on creative thinking differs from their effect on traditional academic tasks.

Highlights

Creativity refers to thoughts, answers, or products that are both original and useful (Guilford, 1950; Mednick, 1962; Sternberg, 1985)
The purpose of the present study was twofold: First, we experimentally investigated whether exposing students to entity or incremental views of creativity would influence their implicit theories of creativity, as it has in past studies of implicit theories of intelligence (Bergen, 1991; Hong et al, 1999), as well as whether those beliefs would affect creative thinking performance
The indirect path from implicit theories to creative thinking was positive and significant (β = .030, p = .031), whereas the indirect path from working memory (WM) to creative thinking was not significant (β = .018, p = .115). These results indicate that WM and cognitive load directly predict creative thinking: Higher WM and lower cognitive load were associated with better creative thinking performance, whereas the effect of implicit theories on creative thinking was fully mediated by cognitive load

Summary

Introduction

Creativity refers to thoughts, answers, or products that are both original and useful (Guilford, 1950; Mednick, 1962; Sternberg, 1985). Individual differences in cognitive ability, long known to affect problem-solving and performance on other complex cognitive tasks (Conway & Engle, 1996; Seyler, Kirk, & Ashcraft, 2003), have been linked to creative performance (Chein & Weisberg, 2014; Lee & Therriault, 2013; Lv, 2015; Silvia & Beaty, 2012; Wechsler et al, 2018). The impacts of WM and cognitive load on complex tasks such as mathematical problem solving (Ayres, 2006a; Beilock & DeCaro, 2007) and retrieval fluency (Rosen & Engle, 1997; Schelble, Therriault, & Miller, 2012) have been studied extensively, their relationship with creative thinking is less clear, in the case of cognitive load. We examined how implicit theories of creativity contribute to creative thinking, taking into account individual differences in cognitive load and WM

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