Creativity and the Stroop interference effect

Creative potential has been variably associated with disinhibition and defocused attention, focused attention and effective cognitive control, or a flexible adaption of cognitive control. The present study examined the relationship between creativity and cognitive control in a sample of design students and a control group. Cognitive control was assessed by a modified Stroop color naming task, in which two color words and two font colors were used to generate congruent and incongruent conditions. Design students showed stronger cognitive control as indicated by the absence of a Stroop interference effect, and performed generally better (faster) on the Stroop task than students in the control group did. Moreover, correlational analyses revealed associations between stronger cognitive control and higher scores in originality, fluency and ideational behavior in psychometric creativity tasks. These results suggest that one cognitive feature of creative individuals is effective suppression of dominant but irrelevant response tendencies.