An Analysis Of Attention As Moderator Of Trait Epistemic Curiosity And Creative Thinking

As an internal motive of human behavior,curiosity promotes individuals to produce a variety of behavior to explore new information or new things.Cognitive curiosity,as a kind of curiosity,is the internal motivation promoting the individual to obtain new knowledge information,including two forms of traits and status.Among them,the trait epistemic curiosity is general tendency or traits that the individual hopes to obtain novel,complex and other information(Mussel,2010)and is also a creative personality trait that affects the individual's creative problem solving.That whether creative problems can be solved successfully depends on creative thinking;while creative thinking has many forms.Researchers have developed many creative problems including remote association tests,Chinese idiom riddle,divergent thinking tests and so on,which leads to that the trait epistemic curiosity can have different effects on different creative problems.However,what is the cognitive mechanism of trait epistemic curiosity in promoting individual creative problem solving?The study assumes that irrelevance processing plays a mediating role in trait epistemic curiosity's predicting creative problem solving.In the study,three types of creative problems are selected and two experiments are carried out.By using two different forms of irrelevance processing,the author examines the impact of trait epistemic curiosity on the three types of creative problem solving,and further explores the trait epistemic curiosity's cognitive mechanism in creative problem solving-irrelevance processing.In the first study,through the DIVA attention task,with the reaction of individuals in finishing DIVA attention task as the behavioral index of irrelevance processing,the author reviews the effect of trait epistemic curiosity on remote association and Chinese idiom riddle and the cognitive mechanism.In the second study,a visual version of the Unusual Uses Task was developed and,using an eye-tracker methodology,the attentional processing of both information that is central to the task,and information that is"apparently" irrelevant for its execution was measured.The conclusion is:(1)trait epistemic curiosity promotes the solving of different creative problems;(2)irrelevance processing plays a mediating role in trait epistemic curiosity's prediction of remote association and the originality of divergent thinking.