Creative and analytic thinkers differ in their use of attentional resources

Creativity involves linking ideas previously seen as unrelated. The creative thinker must attend to elements that are relevant to the current problem while recording seemingly irrelevant information that may lead to insight. Thus, creative thinkers should use peripherally presented cues effectively. Good analytic thinking should be characterized by sustained directed attention because solutions to analytic problems require focus on the problem elements. We predicted that creative thinkers would take advantage of incidentally presented cues, whereas analytic thinkers would not. We used a remote associates test (RAT) to measure creativity and deductive reasoning problems to measure analytic ability. To measure sensitivity to peripheral cues, we adapted a task from Mendelsohn and Griswold (1966). Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that RAT scores predicted ability to use peripheral cues, whereas scores on the deductive task did not.