Experiments On Distractor Inhibition Ability On Undergraduates With Different Level Of Creative Thinking

Negative priming is a kind of basic experimental paradigm that is used to investigate the inhibition in selective attention. Negative priming has two types of location and identity that examine the two types of inhibition accordingly. The automatic inhibition mechanisms assure the activation of information related to the task while ignoring other irrelative information, which can avoid irrelative information entering and interfering the working memory. So distractor inhibition is one of the important factors that affect the fluency and validity of thinking. Creative thinking is the core of thinking, but the relation between creative thinking and distractor inhibition has been hardly researched. The researches on inhibition focus on the deletion of identity and location and examine the relationship among creative thinking, inhibition ability and working memoryFirstly, questionnaire was used to select undergraduates with high and low levels of creative thinking as subjects. Then negative priming paradigm was used to investigate the location and identity inhibition ability of these two groups in the Exp.1-2 experiments. The results indicated that both groups showed significant inhibition ability of location and the ability was not affected by creative thinking. And the low group of subjects showed significant inhibition ability of identity, but the high group did not. Therefore, the inhibition ability of identity was affected by creative thinking significantly. The difference of the inhibition ability and relation between the inhibition ability and working memory in both groups were examined in the Exp. 3. The results showed that the working memory capacity of the high group was significantly higher than the low group. The working memory capacity of both groups was not correlated with the inhibition ability of location.