Effect Of Cognitive Autonomy On Creative Thinking

Cognitive autonomy is a trait that a person thinks independently and forwardly based on personal principles,without the need to seek others' consent or compliance with other wishes.According to the Self-Determination Theory(SDT),high autonomous individual make self-determination,and possess high internal motivation.To date,many studies(Amabile,1994,2001;Heinzen,et al.,1993;Prabhu,Sutton,& Sauser,2008)have found that internal motivation promotes creative thinking,and has a critical role to potential creativity.A study by Zhou(1998)found that subjects havd produced more creative ideas in high autonomy task condition than in low autonomy task condition.Thus,we cannot ignore that autonomy plays an important role in the creative thinking.Cognitive autonomy belongs to autonomy domain,we presume cognitive autonomy significantly affects creative thinking.This paper inclued four studies:The first study developed the Chinese "Cognitive Autonomy Questionnaire" by the methods of interviews and questionnaires,we used item analysis,EFA,CFA and reliability analysis,and we found this questionnaire had good reliability and validity.The second study explored the effect of cognitive autonomy on creative scientific problem finding,we found Compared to low cognitive autonomous subjects,high cognitive autonomous subjects had more flexibility at creative scientific problem finding,especially on the on-limits problem.The third study explored the behavioral and neurophysiologic differences in using clues between high cognitive autonomous subjects and low cognitive autonomous subjects when they solved insight problems.We found that the P2 appeared at parietal lobe and Occipito-vertical.Compared to low cognitive autonomous subjects,the P2 amplitude of high cognitive autonomous subjects was higher when the riddle was present.In addition,high cognitive autonomous subjects was higher on N270 and N400 amplitude,and was lower on LPC amplitude when the clues was present.We thought that LPC which appeared at foreside scalp was related with choosing and integrating exterior clue.The eye movements experiment found that compared to low cognitive autonomous subjects,high cognitive autonomous subjects was higher on IA run count and IA fixation count of riddle,and was lower on IA dwell time and IA fixation count of clue.The IA dwell time of clue of high cognitive autonomous subjects was lower on usual clue than the other types of clues.The fourth study explored the behavioral and neurophysiologic differences between high cognitive autonomous subjects and low cognitive autonomous subjects when they solved words association task,and explored the encephalic region which was related with information-repression and information-activation.We found that divergent thinking was primarily related to right frontal lobe and right anterior temporosphenoid lobe,and LPC(latency in 1000-2000ms)reflected the activation of “distance” semantic information.This study also found that LNC appear at left frontal lobe and left anterior temporosphenoid lobe at the same time window,so we considered that the creative thinking task required the synergy of two hemispheres.In addition,we also found that information-repression task was mainly related to left prefrontal lobe,left frontal lobe and left anterior temporosphenoid lobe.The words association information-repression task induced a negative component N400-800.We believed that it reflected the identification and restrain of outside interferential information.Compared to those subjects under neutral priming condition,the N400-800 amplitude of subjects under the high cognitive autonomous priming condition was higher,and this finding descriped that subjects under the high cognitive autonomous priming condition could more restrain the interfering information.According to those finding,we believed that compared to low cognitive autonomous subjects,high cognitive autonomous subjects was stronger at thinking flexibility,independently thinking,active thinking and discernment to clues.In addition,we also believed that choosing and integrating exterior information was related with foreside scalp,divergent thinking was primarily related to right frontal lobe and right anterior temporosphenoid lobe,information-repression was mainly related to left prefrontal lobe,left frontal lobe and left anterior temporosphenoid lobe.