Assessing the Role of Attentional Inhibition and Cognitive Flexibility in Convergent and Divergent Creative Thinking

Findings regarding the role of attentional inhibition and cognitive flexibility in creative cognition have been inconsistent, potentially due to methodological differences in measures of attention and creativity. To clarify these relationships, we conducted two experiments assessing how attentional inhibition and cognitive flexibility relate to convergent and divergent creative thinking. In Experiment 1, individual differences in flanker task performance (reaction time and accuracy) across congruent, incongruent and reversed trials were used to derive metrics of inhibition and flexibility, which were then used to predict performance on the Compound Remote Associates Test (CRAT) and Alternative Uses Task (AUT). In Experiment 2, we extended this approach by incorporating the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test to measure cognitive flexibility, and by eliciting subjective reports of problem-solving strategy (i.e., insight vs. analysis) for each CRAT item. Across both experiments, convergent creativity, indexed by CRAT accuracy, was predicted by both attentional inhibition and cognitive flexibility, especially when these supported the use of analytic problem-solving strategies. In contrast, divergent creativity showed weaker and more selective associations, whereby attentional inhibition predicted originality in the AUT, but not fluency or diversity, while cognitive flexibility was not significantly related to any AUT dimension. These findings suggest that attentional inhibition and cognitive flexibly play a more central role in convergent than divergent creative thinking.