Research On The Relationship Between Cognitive Inhibition And Creative Thinking

Cognitive inhibition is a kind of important processing mechanism in creative thinking,the relationship between cognitive inhibition and creative thinking has been investigated by many researchers.There are three arguments in previous studies:cognitive inhibition hypothesis,cognitive disinhibition hypothesis and adaptive cognitive inhibition hypothesis.However,research using creative problem solving paradigms to explore the neural basis of creative thinking process was lacking,and the relationship between cognitive inhibition and creative thinking during different stages is unclear yet.Subjucts were selected to complete Chinese compound RAT and the Stroop task inorder to investigate the relationship between creativity and cognitive inhibition.The present study combines behavioral experiments and neuro-scientific methods to investigate the mechanisms of different stages in the process of creative thinking and explore the role of cognitive inhibition during the process.The results of experiment 1 showed that,the accuracy of subjects high cognitive inhibition was significantly more higher than the ones with lower inhibition,and the reaction time is significantly more shorter.The results of experiment 2 showed that,subjects with higher cognitive inhibition as opposed to the subjects with lower inhibition ability elicited significantly different brain potentials in the time course-1200?-1000ms before the onset of an question,which mainly associated with the inhibition of irrelative stimulation in mental preparation stage.The amplitude of N100 components was significantly different,and the difference reflected the mechanisms of regulation of selective attention after the onset of a hint.Moreover,there exit significantly more negative potentials for the problems solved successfully as opposed to unsuccessful ones in the time course 700?900ms after the onset of a hint,which mainly associated with the inhibition of inappropriate mental representations.In conclusion,the present research support cognitive inhibition hypothesis of creative thinking,which believes that creative individuals have greater ability of cognitive inhibition.In the preparation stage,the people with high cognitive inhibition ability can inhibit irrelative stimulation of present tasks.In incubation stage,the inhibition of inappropriate mental representations is necessary.Thus,individuals with high cognitive inhibition are better in integrating the information provided by the hint and accomplish the process of mental set shifting.