ABSTRACT

The question of what type of attention is associated with creative potential has predominantly been examined using divergent thinking tasks and without the benefits of cognitive neuroscience methods. To address this gap, we rely on a neural approach by indexing attention using the P50 ERP component. The P50 measures sensory gating, which is the brain’s ability to filter out or inhibit responses to repeated stimuli. We analyze the relationships between neural responses to P50 and performance on two tasks designed to measure creative potential: a convergent task and a divergent task. While we did not find evidence of a relationship between attention and the originality component of divergent thinking, our results show that leaky attention was positively associated with the fluency component of divergent thinking but negatively associated with performance on the convergent thinking task. This result highlights that the relationship between attention and performance on creative tasks may depend on the type of task.

摘要

注意力集中在哪种类型与创造潜能有关的问题已主要使用发散性思维任务进行了研究，并且没有认知神经科学方法的好处。为了解决这一差距，我们依靠神经方法通过使用P50 ERP组件索引注意力。P50测量感觉门控，即大脑过滤或抑制对重复刺激的反应的能力。我们分析了旨在衡量创造潜能的两项任务对P50的神经反应与绩效之间的关系：趋同任务和发散任务。虽然我们没有找到证据表明注意力与发散思维的独创性之间存在关系，我们的研究结果表明，注意力分散与发散性思维的流畅度成正相关，而与发散性思维任务的表现呈负相关。该结果表明，注意力和创造性任务绩效之间的关系可能取决于任务的类型。