Creativity and Speed of Mental Processing

Abstract

It is reasonable to expect a correlation between creativity and speed of mental processing. Faster mental processing would allow one to learn the elements relevant to a domain and to screen more ideas for creative potential more quickly. However, there is evidence that highly creative people exhibit cognitive disinhibition and defocused attention. Thus, for ambiguous tasks, their speed of mental processing may be slow because they are poor at filtering out irrelevant aspects of stimuli. We tested the hypothesis that creative people should show faster reaction times on unambiguous tasks and slower reaction times on ambiguous tasks than less-creative people. The hypothesis was confirmed. There was a negative correlation between creativity and reaction time on an unambiguous Concept Verification Test and a positive correlation between creativity and a negative priming task.

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