Scientific Creativity And Artistic Creativity: The Fusion And Separation Effect Of Cognitive Control

Creativity is the core topic of human ability. The key to enhance human creativity is to clarify the cognitive characteristic. Some studies have addressed this issue by examining the relationship between cognitive control and creativity. Although there is increasing evidence that creativity is related to cognitive control, this evidence appears to be conflicting. It should be noted that most studies on creativity and cognitive control so far have not considered the role of domain specificity. As different domains of creativity, science and art are correlated with different cognitive factors. The ability to generate creative ideas in scientific activity reflects both novelty and appropriateness, whereas artistic activity emphasizes novelty primarily. However, there are few researches about creative domain through investigating different cognitive characteristics underlying different domains of creativity. Besides, it should also be noted that past researches about the relationship between cognitive control and creativity focused more on inhibition, and other factors of cognitive control are being neglected. Therefore, our study will include stroop task for cognitive inhibition, stop-signal task for response inhibition, and typical numerical classification task for switching ability, to investigate the relationship between cognitive control and creativity in a broad sense.279 middle school students were recruited to complete the questionnaire of scientific creativity as the measure of scientific creativity, the collage task and alien task as the measure of artistic creativity. After completion, we calculated scientific creativity score and artistic creativity score of every participant then chose the former 27% participants of scientific creativity test as the scientific group, the latter 27% participants as the non-scientific group, the former 27% participants of artistic creativity as the artistic group, the latter 27% participants as the non-artistic group. Finally, we chose these participants in both the scientific group and artistic group as the SA group, these participants in both the scientific group and non-artistic group as the SN group, these participants in both the non-scientific group and artistic group as the NA group, these participants in both non-scientific group and non-artistic group as the NN group.In the first experiment, these four groups were administered to Stroop task. Results showed that the cognitive inhibition of SA and SN group were stronger than the other two groups. And there’s no significant difference between the NN and NA group, or between the SA and SN group. These results demonstrated that there’s a diverging role of cognitive inhibition in the relationship between scientific creativity and artistic creativity:scientific creativity needs more cognitive inhibition and artistic creativity doesn’t. In the second experiment, four groups were administered to stop-signal task. Results also showed that the response inhibition of SA and SN group were stronger than the other two groups. And there’s no significant difference between the NN and NA group, or between the SA and SN group. These results demonstrated that there’s also a diverging role of response inhibition in the relationship between scientific creativity and artistic creativity:scientific creativity needs more response inhibition and artistic creativity doesn’t. In the third experiment, four groups were administered to the typical numerical classification task. Results showed that the switching ability of SA, SN and AN group were stronger than the NN group. And there’s no significant difference among the SA, SN and AN group. These results demonstrated that there’s a merging role of switching ability in the relationship between scientific creativity and artistic creativity.In a word, there are both merging and diverging roles of cognitive control in the relationship between scientific and artistic creativity. Both these two domains of creativity are based on a certain level of cognitive control, whereas different domains of creativity are associated with different kinds of cognitive control. Specifically, there is a merging role of switching ability, but a diverging role of cognitive inhibition and response inhibition in the relationship between scientific creativity and artistic creativity. Participant with scientific creativity were inclined to inhibit the irrelevant stimuli and prepotent behavior, whereas participants with artistic creativity were more easily distracted by external stimuli and take action without enough thinking.