Variable Attention Facilitates Creative Problem Solving

Abstract

Traditionally, researchers have associated creativity with defocused attention. Recent experimental evidence contradicts this notion by demonstrating that in creative people, defocused attention is a variable state rather than a stable trait. Specifically, creative people are better at adjusting their focus of attention as a function of task demands. When the task is ill defined and ambiguity is high, attention is defocused, resulting in slower processing on the task. In contrast, when the task is well defined and ambiguity is low, attention is focused, resulting in faster processing on the task. This flexibility can confer distinct advantages to creative people in the course of problem solving as changes in the structure of the problem necessitate corresponding adjustments in solution strategy.

Full text

Variable Attention Facilitates Creative Problem Solving
Oshin Vartanian
DRDC Toronto
Traditionally, researchers have associated creativity with defocused attention. Recent experimental
evidence contradicts this notion by demonstrating that in creative people, defocused attention is a variable
state rather than a stable trait. Specifically, creative people are better at adjusting their focus of attention
as a function of task demands. When the task is ill defined and ambiguity is high, attention is defocused,
resulting in slower processing on the task. In contrast, when the task is well defined and ambiguity is low,
attention is focused, resulting in faster processing on the task. This flexibility can confer distinct
advantages to creative people in the course of problem solving as changes in the structure of the problem
necessitate corresponding adjustments in solution strategy.
Keywords: attention, creativity, problem solving, reaction time
There has been longstanding interest in the role of attention in
the creative process (see Runco & Sakamoto, 1999). This is not
surprising, given that many researchers define the creative process
as one involving the combination of concepts previously thought
to be unrelated (Poincare´, 1913). Because combining two or more
concepts necessitates that they fall within the focus of attention,
variations in the focus of attention can have a direct impact on
one’s ability to engage in this combinatorial activity. By and large,
researchers have argued that in creative people defocused attention
or “broad attentional capacity” is a stable trait (Eysenck, 1995;
Kasof, 1997; Mendelsohn, 1976). Presumably, this stable charac-
teristic enables creative people to attend to more concepts at any
given point in time, thus increasing the likelihood of combining
them into novel and useful products—the accepted definition of
creativity (see Sternberg, 1999).
However, this description of creative people does not ring true
based on what we know from biographical and personality studies
of the problem-solving behavior of eminent scientists (see Feist,
1999; Martindale, 2001). Specifically, the problem-solving behav-
ior of eminent scientists can alternate between extraordinary levels
of focus on specific concepts and playful exploration of ideas. This
suggests that successful problem solving may be a function of
flexible strategy application in relation to task demands. In the
earlier phases of problem solving when the problem space is
relatively ill defined and ambiguous, a state of defocused attention
would appear advantageous as it would enable the problem solver
to explore more concepts in the problem space, potentially increas-
ing the likelihood of sampling relevant building blocks for con-
structing creative solutions. In contrast, in the later phases of
problem solving when the problem space is relatively well defined
and unambiguous, a state of focused attention would appear to be
advantageous as it would enable the problem solver to focus
specifically on those concepts that appear more relevant for further
scrutiny, discarding other less relevant concepts.
Indirectly, such variation in the focus of attention should be
captured by variation in processing latency. When attention is
defocused and the problem solver is attending to more concepts
simultaneously, processing should slow down. In contrast, when
attention is focused and the problem solver is attending to fewer
concepts simultaneously, processing should speed up. Based on
this line of reasoning, we set out to conduct a series of experiments
to test the hypothesis that creative participants would be slower
than noncreative participants on tasks that are ambiguous and
involve interference, but that they should be faster than noncre-
ative participants on tasks that are unambiguous and do not involve
interference. A pattern of findings consistent with this prediction
would provide the necessary ammunition to support the idea that
far from being perpetually defocused, creative people are more
flexible than noncreative people in their focus of attention. What
follows is a summary of the findings of our studies.
Creativity and Speed of Information Processing
Our first study involved a sample of undergraduate men from an
American university (Vartanian, Martindale, & Kwiatkowski,
2007). We measured creative potential using fluency scores from
the Alternate Uses Task. Each participant completed four reaction
time tasks in randomized order, two of which did not involve
interference or ambiguity (Hick Task, Concept Verification Task)
whereas the other two did (Negative Priming, Global-local). As
predicted, there was a significant negative correlation between
creative potential and response latency on the Hick Task and the
Concept Verification Task, whereas there was a significant posi-
tive correlation between creative potential and response latency on
Negative Priming and Global-local. Furthermore, within Global-
local, the positive correlation between creative potential and re-
sponse latency was particularly strong when interference was
maximal, as would be predicted by our hypothesis. These results
demonstrated that participants with higher creative potential are
more flexible along the attention continuum, and that their focus of
attention varies more as a function of the characteristics of the task.
In a follow-up study we sought to replicate our results to test the
robustness of the effect. Testing the same hypothesis, we collected
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Oshin
Vartanian, DRDC Toronto, 1133 Sheppard Avenue West, P. O. Box, 2000,
Toronto, ON, M3M 3B9 Canada. E-mail: oshin.vartanian@drdc-rddc.gc.ca
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts © 2009 by the Crown in Right of Canada
2009, Vol. 3, No. 1, 57–59 1931-3896/09/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0014781
57
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.