The Influence Of Cognitive Inhibition,Need For Cognitive Closure,and Time Pressure On Creative Problem Solving

It is essential to obtain information relevant to the correct solution in creative problem solving,and too much focus on irrelevant information or representations of dominance can hinder the acquisition of the correct solution.Inhibition is one of the important subcomponents of central executive function,which enables individuals to resist the influence of irrelevant information or dominant response to adapt to the current environment.Previous studies on retrieval-induced forgetting have mainly investigated the role of suppressing irrelevant information on creative problem solving.Few studies have explored whether cognitive inhibition hinders problem solving when information related to problem solving is inhabited.At present,some foreign studies have used phonetic materials to explore the effect of inhibiting relevant information on creative problem solving.However,there is still a lack of relevant research and discussion on whether ideographic materials(such as Chinese characters)have a similar effect.Based on previous studies,this study investigated the effects of cognitive inhibition,need for cognitive closure and time pressure on creative problem solving.This study mainly includes three experiments:Experiment 1 used single factor in subject design,the independent variables for the project type,can be divided into three levels: practice project(Rp+),did not practice project(Rp-)and the baseline project(Nrp).The dependent variable was the accuracy of remote associates test.Experiment used 43 college students as subjects and examined the relevant information of cognitive inhibition was hampering the creative problem solving.The results showed that the accuracy of Rpitem was significantly lower than that of Nrp item(baseline level),and there was a significant retrieval-induced forgetting effect.When two groups of tasks involved the same set of materials,the correct rate of problem solving was significantly reduced when the inhibited item in the previous task was the answer to the problem in the subsequent task.It shows that creative problem solving was impeded when information related to problem solving was inhabited.Experiment 2 used 2(need for cognitive closure: high/low)×3(project type: Rp+,Rp-,Nrp)mixed design of two factors.Need for cognitive closure was between-subjects factor.Item type was within-subjects factor.The dependent variable was the accuracy of remote associates test.Experiment used 54 students as participants and investigated need for cognitive closure and cognitive inhibition effects on creative problem solving.The results indicated that the high-NFCC group had higher cognitive inhibition ability and better performance in creative problem solving tasks.Experiment 3 adopted 3(project type: Rp+,Rp-,Nrp)×2(need for cognitive closure: high/low)× 2(time pressure: high/low)mixed design of three factors.Item type was within-subjects factor.Need for cognitive closure and time pressure was between-subjects factors.The dependent variable was the accuracy of remote associates test.Experiment used 64 college students as subjects and investigated the effects of cognitive inhibition,need for cognitive closure and time pressure on creative problem solving.The results showed that the total accuracy of remote associates test in the high time pressure group was significantly lower than that in the low time pressure group.Under high time pressure,individuals with low need for cognitive closure had higher cognitive inhibition ability,but there was no significant difference on total accuracy of remote associates test compared to the low time pressure group.The results of this study suggested that the suppression of information relevant to problem solving hinders creative problem solving.At the same time,under the influence of the motivational factor of need for cognitive closure,individuals had higher cognitive inhibition ability and better performance in creative problem solving tasks.Time in addition,compared with low pressure group,low-NFCC group showed a higher cognitive inhibition ability under the influence of high time pressure,but the total accuracy of remote associates test was not significantly higher than that of low time pressure conditions,possible reason was that time pressure brought problem solving directly negative impact,which makes the cognitive inhibition to overcome the fixation role in problem solving were no longer significant.