Cognitive Inhibition Affects EEG Research In Creative Thinking

As one of the important subcomponents of executive control function,cognitive inhibition plays an important role in a variety of advanced cognitive activities.One important research field is cognitive research on creative thinking.The current relationship between inhibition and creative thinking is still inconclusive,and most previous studies discussed their relationship by regarding inhibition as a personal trait,ignoring the feature that the demand for inhibition in creative thinking is dynamic.Therefore,this study regarded inhibition as a kind of status,to explore the impact of two kinds of inhibition status(high inhibition status/low inhibition status)on creative thinking by EEG technique.The first study is a behavioral experiment,as an initial exploration of inhibition status on different creative thinking(divergent thinking/convergent thinking).The Flanker task was used to divide participants into high inhibition status group and low inhibition status group by manipulating the proportion of incongruent trials.The impact of inhibition on two tasks-divergent thinking task AUT and the convergent thinking task RAT-was studied.The results show that:(1)participants with high inhibition status were significantly greater on flexibility and originality than participants with low inhibition status;(3)There was no difference in convergent task between the two groups.In the second study,we used the same research paradigm.By using the EEG technique,the neural difference in two tasks between these two groups was investigated.The results showed that:(1)the high inhibition participants had a smaller waveform of P300 on incongruent trials than the low inhibition participants,indicating that the high inhibition group invested less in cognitive resources and showed a stronger inhibition tendency;(2)high inhibition group showed synchronization decrease in parietooccipital area,while low inhibition group showed synchronization increase in the same area,which related to their inhibition status;(3)high inhibition group had a stronger a wave activation,and showed the right hemisphere advantage on DT;(4)both group showed increased a wave synchronization in anteriofrontal area,which reflected more internally oriented attention that is characterized by the absence of external bottom-up stimulation and,thus,a form of top-down activity.In summary,the high inhibition status promotes individuals to have greater flexibility and to produce more unique answers.