Nonetheless, we believe our data reviews point in a direction that could greatly advance knowledge. Although the traits
do not always go in lockstep, our data and analyses raise new research directions that should be seriously explored. “
“At the heart of every conception of creativity stands the creation of new ideas. Research, therefore, targets at a better understanding of the cognitive processes involved in creative ideation. Gilhooly, Fioratou, Anthony, and Wynn (2007) performed a detailed analysis of the alternate uses task and found that the fluent production of new uses was predicted by the “executively loading task” letter fluency, while the production of familiar uses (i.e., retrieved from long-term memory selleck chemicals rather than created during the task) was not. They assumed that people with higher executive capacity may find it easier to find more inhibit dominant responses and switch strategies or categories. In a similar vein, Nusbaum and Silvia (2011) showed that fluid intelligence predicts higher switching of categories
during an idea generation task, which corresponds to high divergent thinking performance. A study by Benedek, Könen, and Neubauer (in press) showed that creativity is substantially predicted by the abilities of dissociation and associative combination. This suggests that the generation of creative ideas requires fluent generation and combination of mutually remote associative elements (Mednick, 1962). At this, it was hypothesized that dissociation ability may reflect an indicator of semantic inhibition facilitating the fluent access to new and remote concepts. These findings suggest that creative ability is related to executive functioning. Some other studies have addressed this issue by using explicit tests of executive function and specifically with tests of
cognitive inhibition. Golden (1975) reports that, in a study involving high school students, high performance in the color-word Stroop task (i.e., a classic measure of cognitive inhibition which requires to name the font color of words which can be incongruent to the word meaning) was positively Epothilone B (EPO906, Patupilone) related to divergent thinking performance and to teacher ratings of students’ creativity. Similar evidence was obtained by Groborz and Nęcka (2003), who showed that creativity assessed by divergent figural production was related to higher cognitive control as indexed by the Stroop and the Navon task (i.e., a task which requires to focus either on local or global features of a stimulus and to inhibit incongruent features). However, not all studies find support for a positive relation of creativity and cognitive inhibition. Some studies report no correlation of creativity and cognitive inhibition (Burch et al., 2006, Green and Williams, 1999 and Stavridou and Furnham, 1996).