Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin· 2012Q1
Working Memory Benefits Creative Insight, Musical Improvisation, and Original Ideation Through Maintained Task-Focused Attention
- 379citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2012year
Short summary
Higher working memory capacity (WMC) enhances creative performance, including insight, musical improvisation, and original ideation, by enabling sustained task-focused attention and preventing mind wandering.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Working memory capacity (WMC) is positively associated with creative performance across various domains.
- High WMC enables sustained task-focused attention, preventing mind wandering, which is critical for creativity.
- Cognitive load negatively impacts creative insight tasks.
- WMC predicts original ideation through persistent, rather than flexible, processing.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Anecdotes from creative eminences suggest that executive control plays an important role in creativity, but scientific evidence is sparse. Invoking the Dual Pathway to Creativity Model, the authors hypothesize that working memory capacity (WMC) relates to creative performance because it enables persistent, focused, and systematic combining of elements and possibilities (persistence). Study 1 indeed showed that under cognitive load, participants performed worse on a creative insight task. Study 2 revealed positive associations between time-on-task and creativity among individuals high but not low in WMC, even after controlling for general intelligence. Study 3 revealed that across trials, semiprofessional cellists performed increasingly more creative improvisations when they had high rather than low WMC. Study 4 showed that WMC predicts original ideation because it allows persistent (rather than flexible) processing. The authors conclude that WMC benefits creativity because it enables the individual to maintain attention focused on the task and prevents undesirable mind wandering.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2012 · DOI ↗
Continue with a free account
Ask the paper: 3 free questions a day about this paper; save it, get its citation, new summaries every day for your field. Takeaways are Premium.
Continue free on the webSign in with Google or Apple; no card needed. You come back to this paper.
On your phone:
Field: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Experimental and Cognitive PsychologyPsychology