Managing your muse: Exploring three levels of metacognitive control in creative ideation

Creative ideation tasks are typically ill-defined and open-ended, and thus should benefit from metacognition efforts. However, the role of metacognitive processes – especially metacognitive control – in creative ideation appears understudied. Therefore, we conducted an online study (N = 317) investigating the relationship between divergent thinking (DT) performance and different aspects of metacognitive control. In line with the recently proposed creative metacognition framework (Lebuda & Benedek, 2023), we devised measures that delineate metacognitive control at the levels of task, performance, and responses: Metacognitive control at task level was assessed in terms of attention focus devoted to each task; metacognitive control at performance level was assessed in terms of the goal-directedness of the employed task strategy; metacognitive control at response level was assessed in terms of how effectively uncreative ideas were screened out. We observed substantial individual differences in all three measures as well as first evidence of their validity. Importantly, metacognitive control at all three levels independently predicted higher DT creativity. Additional analyses suggested that effects of metacognitive control may extend to creative behavior, partly mediated by DT. In sum, this study provides first empirical support for the relevance of distinguishable aspects of metacognitive control in creative performance.