Experimental Research, Creative Thinking And Processing Speed And Working Memory Relations

In recent years, the research on creative thinking has been closely related to cognitive field. However, creative thinking is a sophisticated as well as argumentative concept, and the research on its cognitive structure has always been disputed: some researchers think that creative thinking comes into being on the basis of cognitive control and it has a characteristic of defocusing attention and meanwhile highly creative individuals are easy to be interfered with irrelevant information during information processing; others think that the intensity of cognitive control is the key element for creative thinking and it can avoid the interference caused by unrelated information and therefore the speed of information processing can be effectively increased. Based on previous studies both at home and abroad, this research firstly chooses university students of different creative thinking levels as the subjects of tests, and secondly a simple information processing task and a complex information processing task are adopted in experiment 1 and experiment 2 respectively to investigate the differences of speed of information processing of different subjects in different tasks. Experiment 3 explores the differences of subjects' processing efficiency in working memory. The research finds:1. In the simple task, the subjects of high-level creative thinking group are much quicker than that of low-level group in information processing; the reaction time of the simple task has a function of negatively forecasting the creative thinking level, and the fluidity has the closest negative relation to the simple task.2. In the complex task, both the high-level and the low-level creative thinking groups present obvious Stroop effect and Navon effect. However, the differences of the quantity of subjects' color negative activation are not remarkable, which shows that the subjects' color controlling abilities don't change significantly with the change of their creative thinking levels. The reaction time of the complex task has a significant function of positively forecasting the creative thinking level.3. In the working memory task, the subjects of high-level creative thinking group are more effective than that of low-level group in working memory processing. The space tracking working memory task has a significant negative relation to creative thinking and originality dimension.4. Based on the research results of the aforementioned experiments and existing theories, the author draws a tentative conclusion that the main elements that exert influence on the relationship among creative thinking, speed of processing and working memory lie in the ability of attention control and the capacity of attention focus.