Although anecdotes that creative thoughts often arise when one is engaged in an unrelated train of thought date back thousands of years, empirical research has not yet investigated this potentially critical source of inspiration. We used an incubation paradigm to assess whether performance on validated creativity problems (the Unusual Uses Task, or UUT) can be facilitated by engaging in either a demanding task or an undemanding task that maximizes mind wandering. Compared with engaging in a demanding task, rest, or no break, engaging in an undemanding task during an incubation period led to substantial improvements in performance on previously encountered problems. Critically, the context that improved performance after the incubation period was associated with higher levels of mind wandering but not with a greater number of explicitly directed thoughts about the UUT. These data suggest that engaging in simple external tasks that allow the mind to wander may facilitate creative problem solving.

Innovation, the development and intentional introduction of new and useful ideas by individuals, teams, and organizations, lies at the heart of human adaptation. Decades of research in different disciplines and at different organizational levels have produced a wealth of knowledge about how innovation emerges and the factors that facilitate and inhibit innovation. We propose that this knowledge needs integration. In an initial step toward this goal, we apply a dialectic perspective on innovation to overcome limitations of dichotomous reasoning and to gain a more valid account of innovation. We point out that individuals, teams, and organizations need to self-regulate and manage conflicting demands of innovation and that multiple pathways can lead to idea generation and innovation. By scrutinizing the current use of the concept of organizational ambidexterity and extending it to individuals and teams, we develop a framework to help guide and facilitate future research and practice. Readers expecting specific and universal prescriptions of how to innovate will be disappointed as current research does not allow such inferences. Rather, we think innovation research should focus on developing and testing principles of innovation management in addition to developing decision aids for organizational practice. To this end, we put forward key propositions and action principles of innovation management.

To assess distracted attention and performance on a computer task following completion of a sustained attention and acute media multitasking task among adolescents with varying self-reported usual media multitasking.

Reductions in latent inhibition (LI), the capacity to screen from conscious awareness stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant, have been generally associated with the tendency towards psychosis. However, "failure" to screen out previously irrelevant stimuli might also hypothetically contribute to original thinking, particularly in combination with high IQ. Meta-analysis of two studies, conducted on youthful high-IQ samples. demonstrated that high lifetime creative achievers had significantly lower LI scores than low creative achievers (r(effect size) =.31, p =.0003, one-tailed). Eminent creative achievers (participants under 21 years who reported unusually high scores in a single domain of creative achievement) were 7 times more likely to have low rather than high LI scores, chi2 (1, N = 25) = 10.69, phi =.47. p =.003.

Predictions concerning development, interrelations, and possible independence of working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility were tested in 325 participants (roughly 30 per age from 4 to 13 years and young adults; 50% female). All were tested on the same computerized battery, designed to manipulate memory and inhibition independently and together, in steady state (single-task blocks) and during task-switching, and to be appropriate over the lifespan and for neuroimaging (fMRI). This is one of the first studies, in children or adults, to explore: (a) how memory requirements interact with spatial compatibility and (b) spatial incompatibility effects both with stimulus-specific rules (Simon task) and with higher-level, conceptual rules. Even the youngest children could hold information in mind, inhibit a dominant response, and combine those as long as the inhibition required was steady-state and the rules remained constant. Cognitive flexibility (switching between rules), even with memory demands minimized, showed a longer developmental progression, with 13-year-olds still not at adult levels. Effects elicited only in Mixed blocks with adults were found in young children even in single-task blocks; while young children could exercise inhibition in steady state it exacted a cost not seen in adults, who (unlike young children) seemed to re-set their default response when inhibition of the same tendency was required throughout a block. The costs associated with manipulations of inhibition were greater in young children while the costs associated with increasing memory demands were greater in adults. Effects seen only in RT in adults were seen primarily in accuracy in young children. Adults slowed down on difficult trials to preserve accuracy; but the youngest children were impulsive; their RT remained more constant but at an accuracy cost on difficult trials. Contrary to our predictions of independence between memory and inhibition, when matched for difficulty RT correlations between these were as high as 0.8, although accuracy correlations were less than half that. Spatial incompatibility effects and global and local switch costs were evident in children and adults, differing only in size. Other effects (e.g., asymmetric switch costs and the interaction of switching rules and switching response-sites) differed fundamentally over age.

Rigid thinking is associated with less creativity, suggesting that priming a flexible mind-set should boost creative thought. In three studies, we investigate whether priming multiple social identities predicts more creativity in domains unrelated to social identity. Study 1 asked monoracial and multiracial participants to write about their racial identities before assessing creativity. Priming a multiracial’s racial identity led to greater creativity compared to a no-prime control. Priming a monoracial’s racial identity did not affect creativity. Study 2 showed that reminding monoracials that they, too, have multiple identities increased creativity. Study 3 replicated this effect and demonstrated that priming a multiracial identity for monoracials did not affect creativity. These results are the first to investigate the association between flexible identities and flexible thinking, highlighting the potential for identity versatility to predict cognitive differences between individuals who have singular versus multifaceted views of their social selves.

We propose that dishonest and creative behavior have something in common: They both involve breaking rules. Because of this shared feature, creativity may lead to dishonesty (as shown in prior work), and dishonesty may lead to creativity (the hypothesis we tested in this research). In five experiments, participants had the opportunity to behave dishonestly by overreporting their performance on various tasks. They then completed one or more tasks designed to measure creativity. Those who cheated were subsequently more creative than noncheaters, even when we accounted for individual differences in their creative ability (Experiment 1). Using random assignment, we confirmed that acting dishonestly leads to greater creativity in subsequent tasks (Experiments 2 and 3). The link between dishonesty and creativity is explained by a heightened feeling of being unconstrained by rules, as indicated by both mediation (Experiment 4) and moderation (Experiment 5).

Recent research suggests that frequently switching between various forms of media (i.e. 'media multitasking') is associated with diminished attentional abilities, a disconcerting result given the prevalence of media multitasking in today's society. In the present study, we sought to investigate the extent to which the deficits associated with frequent media multitasking can be temporarily ameliorated via a short-term mindfulness intervention previously shown to produce beneficial effects on the attentional abilities of normally functioning individuals. Consistent with previous work, we found: (1) that heavy media multitaskers showed generally poorer attentional abilities than light media multitaskers and (2) that all participants showed benefits from the short-term mindfulness intervention. Furthermore, we found that the benefits of the short-term mindfulness intervention were not equivalently large across participants. Instead, these benefits were disproportionately large in the heavy media multitaskers. While the positive outcomes were short-lived, this opens the possibility of performing long-term interventions with the goal of realizing lasting gains in this population.

Several studies suggest that mind wandering (MW) benefits creativity when the MW occurs in the incubation period of creative problem solving. The aim of present study was to examine the effects of MW that occurs in the course of creative idea generation. Participants received an Alternative Uses Task (AUT) and were asked to generate ideas for 20min. Their MW frequencies as time passed were measured by means of probe-caught MW. Comparisons of the AUT performances of high and low MW groups revealed that greater MW was associated with lower fluency and originality scores on the AUT. Furthermore, the high MW group showed greater MW as time passed, while the low MW group's MW was steady during the course of idea generation. Accordingly, the originality of idea generation decreased with time passing for the high MW group but was steady for the low MW group. The findings suggest that the MW during the course of creative idea generation is negatively related to creativity, perhaps because the control processes involved in idea generation are impaired by the mind wandering. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The aim of this fMRI investigation was to identify those areas of the brain associated with approaching a story generation task creatively and to investigate the effects upon these correlates of incorporating a set of words that were unrelated to each other-a strategy considered to encourage semantic divergence. Preliminary experiments were undertaken to investigate the possible confounding effects of the scanner environment upon creativity and to reveal the effects of creative effort and word relatedness upon the creativity of those who would be participating in the fMRI scan. In the final part of the investigation, a factorial fMRI design was used to elucidate brain regions involved in increased creative effort and also the effect upon activity in these regions when participants incorporated words that bore little semantic relationship with each other. Results support the notion that areas of the right prefrontal cortex are critical to the types of divergent semantic processing involved with creativity in this context.

Many empirical evidences provide sufficient support on the assumption that multicultural experience fosters creativity. The effect could be observed only in the individuals who engaged in two inconsistent cultures deeply. Moreover, the cognitive skills which include alternation, integration and inclusion developed by dual-identity individuals, foster their creativity. Future researches could be directed to strengthen its external validity in diverse samples, explore the mediating role of other variables such as stress appraisal, approach motivation, positive emotions, and expand domestic research on this topic.

The current generation of young people indulges in more media multitasking behavior (e.g., instant messaging while watching videos) in their everyday lives than older generations. Concerns have been raised about how this might affect their attentional functioning, as previous studies have indicated that extensive media multitasking in everyday life may be associated with decreased attentional control. In the current study, 149 adolescents and young adults (aged 13-24years) performed speech-listening and reading tasks that required maintaining attention in the presence of distractor stimuli in the other modality or dividing attention between two concurrent tasks. Brain activity during task performance was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We studied the relationship between self-reported daily media multitasking (MMT), task performance and brain activity during task performance. The results showed that in the presence of distractor stimuli, a higher MMT score was associated with worse performance and increased brain activity in right prefrontal regions. The level of performance during divided attention did not depend on MMT. This suggests that daily media multitasking is associated with behavioral distractibility and increased recruitment of brain areas involved in attentional and inhibitory control, and that media multitasking in everyday life does not translate to performance benefits in multitasking in laboratory settings.Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The aim of this study was to identify the cognitive factors that predictability and adaptability during multitasking with a flight simulator.Multitasking has become increasingly prevalent as most professions require individuals to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Considerable research has been undertaken to identify the characteristics of people (i.e., individual differences) that predict multitasking ability. Although working memory is a reliable predictor of general multitasking ability (i.e., performance in normal conditions), there is the question of whether different cognitive faculties are needed to rapidly respond to changing task demands (adaptability).Participants first completed a battery of cognitive individual differences tests followed by multitasking sessions with a flight simulator. After a baseline condition, difficulty of the flight simulator was incrementally increased via four experimental manipulations, and performance metrics were collected to assess multitasking ability and adaptability.Scholastic aptitude and working memory predicted general multitasking ability (i.e., performance at baseline difficulty), but spatial manipulation (in conjunction with working memory) was a major predictor of adaptability (performance in difficult conditions after accounting for baseline performance).Multitasking ability and adaptability may be overlapping but separate constructs that draw on overlapping (but not identical) sets of cognitive abilities.The results of this study are applicable to practitioners and researchers in human factors to assess multitasking performance in real-world contexts and with realistic task constraints. We also present a framework for conceptualizing multitasking adaptability on the basis of five adaptability profiles derived from performance on tasks with consistent versus increased difficulty.

Chronic media multitasking is quickly becoming ubiquitous, although processing multiple incoming streams of information is considered a challenge for human cognition. A series of experiments addressed whether there are systematic differences in information processing styles between chronically heavy and light media multitaskers. A trait media multitasking index was developed to identify groups of heavy and light media multitaskers. These two groups were then compared along established cognitive control dimensions. Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set. These results demonstrate that media multitasking, a rapidly growing societal trend, is associated with a distinct approach to fundamental information processing.

A number of studies have recently examined the link between individual differences in media multitasking (using the MMI) and performance on working memory paradigms. However, these studies have yielded mixed results. Here we examine the relation between media multitasking and one particular working memory paradigm-the n-back (2- and 3-back)-improving upon previous research by (a) treating media multitasking as a continuous variable and adopting a correlational approach as well as (b) using a large sample of participants. First, we found that higher scores on the MMI were associated with a greater proportion of omitted trials on both the 2-back and 3-back, indicating that heavier media multitaskers were more disengaged during the n-back. In line with such a claim, heavier media multitaskers were also more likely to confess to responding randomly during various portions of the experiment, and to report media multitasking during the experiment itself. Importantly, when controlling for the relation between MMI scores and omissions, higher scores on the MMI were associated with an increase in false alarms, but not with a change in hits. These findings refine the extant literature on media multitasking and working memory performance (specifically, performance on the n-back), and suggest that media multitasking may be related to the propensity to disengage from ongoing tasks.

Creative thinking is an important psychological foundation in advancing not only scientific and technological progresses, but also human society and cultural development. The present work reviewed existing investigations on gender difference in creative thinking and mainly discussed those behavioral differences on convergent thinking and divergent thinking as well as its relevant neural manifestations of gender effect. With regarding to gender difference in divergent thinking, the female exhibited relative advantages; however, the male showed significant gender dominance in convergent thinking. These differences in behavioral performance across two genders might originate from the dissimilar processing advantages of brain hemispheres and could be mediated by several factors such as gender role and personality traits. The present study reviewed the findings on these differences and recommended several directions in future studies.

With recent developments in technology, media multitasking is an ever-increasing phenomenon. Although most studies associate media multitasking with high impulsivity and poorer cognitive performance, findings in the literature have been mixed, with some studies suggesting the opposite. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between media multitasking and the capacity to exert inhibitory control, as well as the ability to multitask in a multisensory setting. Results showed that media multitasking was associated with high attentional impulsivity and lower initiatory self-control, but not with inhibitory self-control. Relatedly, heavy media multitaskers were slower and showed more omission errors on the go/no-go task, suggestive of inattention; however, they were better at inhibiting already initiated motoric responses in the stop signal task. Media multitasking was further associated with faster responses when a letter and a tone task were temporally separated, but not when they were presented closer in time. Taken together, the results suggest a more nuanced relationship between media multitasking, personality and cognitive ability than has previously been thought. This has important real life implications for media multitasking, showing both advantages and disadvantages.

The current research investigated how patterns of home and host cultural identification can explain which individuals who have lived abroad achieve the greatest creative and professional success. We hypothesized that individuals who identified with both their home and host cultures (i.e., biculturals) would show enhanced creativity and professional success compared with individuals who identified with only a single culture (i.e., assimilated and separated individuals). Further, we expected that these effects would be driven by biculturals' greater levels of integrative complexity, an information processing capacity that involves considering and combining multiple perspectives. Two studies demonstrated that biculturals exhibited more fluency, flexibility, and novelty on a creative uses task (Study 1) and produced more innovations at work (Study 2) than did assimilated or separated individuals. Study 3 extended these findings to general professional outcomes: Bicultural professionals achieved higher promotion rates and more positive reputations compared with assimilated or separated individuals. Importantly, in all 3 studies, integrative complexity mediated the relationship between home/host identification and performance. Overall, the current results demonstrate who is most likely to achieve professional and creative success following experiences abroad and why.

<p id="p00005"> Threats are stimuli that may cause disgust, harm, or loss to individuals. These stimuli have not yet occurred but are foreseeable. They can easily induce negative emotions, such as anxiety and fear, and affect an individual’s cognitive ability and creativity. Creativity is the ability that an individual can take initiative to create novel (i.e. original and unexpected) and useful products with social value for a certain purpose.&nbsp;&nbsp;<br>The impact of threats on creativity is one of the concerned and controversial topics in the field of psychology. Currently, there are three viewpoints: threats can hinder creativity generally; threats can promote creativity; in some certain conditions, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between threats and creativity to illustrate how different levels of threats affect creativity. There are plenty of theoretical and empirical studies supporting these three viewpoints respectively. However, why these three viewpoints exist and what their divergence and their underlying mechanisms are still unclear. Through scanning through a considerable amount of studies, it is found that a reasonable perspective for understanding the relationship between the two can be provided by studying the distinction and connection between cognition and emotion. The distinction and connection between cognition and emotion can provide a reasonable perspective for understanding the relationship between them. Therefore, based on comparing and summarizing previous studies, this review explored the reasons for the divergence and reviewed them from the perspectives of cognition and emotion. As a result, it is found that divergence comes from the differences in threat levels, creativity mechanisms, creativity task difficulties, and additional mediator/modulator variables between threat and creativity. Specifically, High-level and low-level threats can attract individual’s different levels of attention and take up different amounts of cognitive resources, thus have different impacts on other following tasks. The difference in creativity mechanisms reflects in the difference between divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking is that people produce as many solutions to the problems of vague definition as possible. Whereas convergent thinking is that people rely on quick identification of the clearly defined the problem to find the best solution. Divergent thinking depends on cognitive flexibility more, while convergent thinking prefers to depend on cognitive persistence. When Individuals are facing different tasks, the demands for working memory are different. Compared with simple tasks, complex tasks have higher requirements on the participation of the working memory system, and at the same time they take up more cognitive resources, Therefore, individuals faced with complex tasks may bring worse performance than those faced with simple tasks. In addition, the different mediating/moderating variables between threat and creativity may have different or even opposite effects on the creativity tasks.<br>For future researches, they can focus on systematically verifying the reasons for the divergence from the perspectives of cognitive and emotional intervention. Specifically, future researchers can explore the impact of different levels of threats on individual’s divergent and convergent thinking. In addition, it is necessary to explore the possible mediating/modulating variables (such as emotion regulation, self-affirmation, etc.) and find out how these variables affect the relationship between threats and creativity. Furthermore, the research on the relationship between threat and creativity should pay attention to the inverted U-shaped model and they can start with studying the balance of motivation and emotion, and then explore the critical point in the inverted U-shaped curve. In addition, when exploring the above issues, the best way is to try to combine different brain imaging technologies to thoroughly investigate the role of many brain areas that are responsible for threat information processing and emotions, and the functional links between these brain areas to explore the impact of threats on creativity. Finally, the cognitive neuroscience can be combined with gene mechanisms to explore the relationship between threat and creativity and clarify the nature of the problem.</p>

Two studies used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether and how divergent thinking and creative achievement are linked to attentional flexibility and cognitive control as indexed by response times and by the amplitude of the anterior N2 ERP component. Both experiments used an oddball paradigm in which participants viewed hierarchical letter stimuli and identified target letters in frequent and rare target trials. The successful identification of targets required attentional flexibility when switching levels of attention (from the frequent global to the rare local attentional level, or vice-versa). Divergent thinkers showed smaller switching times on rare target trials, indicating higher levels of attentional flexibility. Furthermore, divergent thinkers engaged cognitive control processes more strongly at the moment of the attentional switch (and before the response), as indicated by a larger N2 difference between frequent and rare targets. In contrast, creative achievement was associated neither with the switching times on rare target trials, nor with a larger N2 difference between frequent and rare targets. All results held when controlling for general intelligence. Results from these studies provide evidence that divergent thinking is associated with higher attentional flexibility and that such attentional flexibility relies on cognitive control processes required when disengaging from one level of attention (e.g., global), and shifting to the other level of attention (e.g., local).Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

While recent studies have investigated how processes underlying human creativity are affected by particular visual-attentional states, we tested the impact of more stable attention related preferences. These were assessed by means of Navon's global local task, in which participants respond to the global or local features of large letters constructed from smaller letters. Three standard measures were derived from this task: the sizes of the global precedence effect, the global interference effect (i.e., the impact of incongruent letters at the global level on local processing), and the local interference effect (i.e., the impact of incongruent letters at the local level on global processing). These measures were correlated with performance in a convergent-thinking creativity task (the Remote Associates Task), a divergent-thinking creativity task (the Alternate Uses Task), and a measure of fluid intelligence (Raven's matrices). Flexibility in divergent thinking was predicted by the local interference effect while convergent thinking was predicted by intelligence only. We conclude that a stronger attentional bias to visual information about the "bigger picture" promotes cognitive flexibility in searching for multiple solutions.