ArticleCreativity research journal2024
Variation in Divergent Thinking, Executive-Control Abilities, and Mind-Wandering Measured In and Out of the Laboratory.
Article in Creativity research journal, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The Relative Accuracy of Different Methods for Measuring Mind Wandering Subtypes: A Systematic Review.Brain and behavior · 2025Pooled it
- The two correlations between Academic Stress and Subjective Academic Achievement: the mediating roles of Emotion Regulation and Cognitive Decline, and the moderating role of Mind Wandering.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Building a construct-valid battery of performance and self-report indicators of sustained attention consistency.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
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7 authors.
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Abstract
Individual differences in executive functions (or executive control abilities) predict variation in creative thinking ability. Relatedly, propensity for mind-wandering-or task unrelated thought-has been gaining attention among creativity scholars, but its effects on creativity remain unclear. The present study conceptually replicates and extends recent laboratory and experience-sampling work to assess the links between individual differences in divergent thinking, executive control abilities (working memory capacity and attention control), and measures of mind-wandering collected in both contexts. SEM analyses indicated that executive control factors weakly predicted divergent thinking scores, mainly due to their role in filtering out uncreative ideas rather than generating highly novel ones. Lab-based measures of mind-wandering didn't significantly correlate with overall creative thinking, challenging the idea that mind-wandering uniformly enhances creativity, but they were positively linked to highly creative divergent thinking scores. Daily-life measures of mind-wandering, meanwhile, did not provide stronger predictive insights into creative thinking than lab measures. Finally, exploratory analyses found that divergent thinking scores based on highly creative responses were positively associated with episodes of more fantastical, unrealistic mind-wandering, or "daydreaming." We end our investigation with a call for greater theoretical precision and some hypotheses to guide future work. [Data, scripts, and preprint: https://osf.io/at5gx/].
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.