UC Santa Cruz

This Dissertation investigated the interplay between executive function, creative thinking, and examples. Over 200 participants completed this experiment consisting of a battery of five creative thinking tasks and a battery of seven executive function tasks. All participants completed two different versions of each of the creative thinking tasks, one version with the help of examples to get them started on idea generation and one version without the help of examples. Data were analyzed both as latent and observed variables.

Key results indicated that: (1) participants generated ideas that were rated as more creative when they had the help of examples than when they did not have examples; (2) executive function (particularly inhibition) was positively related to creativity in both conditions; (3) the role of executive function was not observed to depend on whether examples were involved in the idea generation process; and (4) conformity to examples was not observed to mediate the relation between executive function and creativity.