Relationship Between Cognitive Styles And Creative Thinking

Creativity refers to the ability to generate the idea or production of something both novel and useful within a given social context. Guilford indicated that creative thinking could be the concrete manifestation of individual creativity, and the core of it was divergent thinking. Divergent thinking tests require subjects to respond variedly, which is different from the achievement and ability standard tests. There are three statistical indexes in creative thinking tests, including novelty, flexibility and fluency. Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) is the most widely used divergent thinking test. Meanwhile, cognitive neuroscience has developed rapidly, especially for the multi-mode neuroimaging technique, which will provide technical support for further brain exploration of creative.Creativity has complex cognitive function, and it will be influenced by physiology factor, cognitive factor, knowledge factor, power factor, personality factor, external factor and so on. As a stable individual difference variable, cognitive styles have an indirect effect on creative thinking. Most previous researches investigated the relationship between cognitive styles and creative thinking only from the behavioral level. Therefore, this research would discuss the relationship between cognitive styles and creative thinking both from cognitive mechanism level and neural mechanism level.In Research1, behavioral measures consisted of questionnaires of TTCT, Embedded figures test (EFT), general intelligence, and demographic. Results found there was a significant correlation between EFT scores and the total score of TTCT. Furthermore, among three sub-dimensions, only flexibility was found to correlate with EFT scores significantly. This result indicated that cognitive styles could affect creative thinking, because of the relationship between cognitive styles and flexibility. Research2recruited286undergraduates as subjects, and explored the neuromechanism underlie the relationship between cognitive styles and flexibility. In this study, we analyzed the correlations between EFT score and regional gray matter volume (rGMV). After took the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL) to be the seed region, we investigated correlations across subjects between the EFT score and the strength of functional connectivity at rest (rFC) between the IPL and other brain regions. At last, through the mediation analyses, we discussed how cognitive styles effect flexibility. Results shown that the rGMV of left IPL had a significant positive correlation with EFT score; the mediation analyses of structural imaging data found the rGMV of IPL mediated the correlation of cognitive styles and flexibility; the results also showed that the strength of rFC with the left IPL significantly correlated with EFT scores in6other brain regions, including precuneus. Interestingly, mediation analyses revealed that cognitive styles had a significant indirect effect on flexibility via the strength of rFC with the left IPL and precuneus. These results suggested that left IPL might be associated with local visual processing, which supported the underlying neuroanatomical bases linked to the cognitive styles. In the neuroanatomical level, this research indicated that field-independent individual had much larger rGMV, which was associated with superior detail-oriented visual processing and identification in different kinds of stimulus and such ability would help to improve flexibility. In the functional respect, this research speculated that field-independent individual had stronger strength of rFC with the left IPL and precuneus, which supported better visual integrative capacity and established novel association and flexibility would be enhanced from this way. In addition, there exists other functional indirect factors between cognitive styles and creative thinking.