e02: Creativity & Attention
May 18th, 2022
18:00-19:00 CET (Europe) • 1:00-2:00 EST (North America, Eastern)
We’ll be discussing “Flexible or leaky attention in creative people? Distinct patterns of attention for different types of creative thinking” by Zabelina and colleagues (2016). This paper looks at how different aspects of creativity are correlated with different types of attention. The researchers conducted two experiments to see how the ability to come up with new ideas (Divergent Thinking) and the capacity to succeed in creative domains (Creative Achievement) relate to visual attention. The first experiment found that Divergent Thinking is related to being able to quickly switch attention, while Creative Achievement is not. In the second experiment, the results suggested that real-world creative seekers have the propensity to better notice information that may not be relevant to the task at hand, a phenomenon known as diffuse or "leaky" attention. Hence, divergent thinkers may have flexible but selective attention, while creative achievers may have more diffuse or leaky attention.
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📄 Zabelina, Saporta, & Beeman, 2016:
Flexible or leaky attention in creative people? Distinct patterns of attention for different types of creative thinking. Memory & Cognition, 44(3), 488-498.
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• Zabelina’s Lab: Mechanisms of Creative Cognition & Attention
• Beeman’s Lab: Creative Cognition Lab
• Related Book Chapter: The Cambridge Handbook of the Neuroscience of Creativity: Ch 9–Attention and Creativity
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Creativity has been putatively linked to distinct forms of attention, but which aspects of creativity and which components of attention remains unclear. Two experiments examined how divergent thinking and creative achievement relate to visual attention. In both experiments, participants identified target letters (S or H) within hierarchical stimuli (global letters made of local letters), after being cued to either the local or global level. In Experiment 1, participants identified the targets more quickly following valid cues (80 % of trials) than following invalid cues. However, this smaller validity effect was associated with higher divergent thinking, suggesting that divergent thinking was related to quicker overcoming of invalid cues, and thus to flexible attention. Creative achievement was unrelated to the validity effect. Experiment 2 examined whether divergent thinking (or creative achievement) is related to “leaky attention,” so that when cued to one level of a stimulus, some information is still processed, or leaks in, from the non-cued level. In this case, the cued stimulus level always contained a target, and the non-cued level was congruent, neutral, or incongruent with the target. Divergent thinking did not relate to stimulus congruency. In contrast, high creative achievement was related to quicker responses to the congruent than to the incongruent stimuli, suggesting that real-world creative achievement is indeed associated with leaky attention, whereas standard laboratory tests of divergent thinking are not. Together, these results elucidate distinct patterns of attention for different measures of creativity. Specifically, creative achievers may have leaky attention, as suggested by previous literature, whereas divergent thinkers have selective yet flexible attention.