Noticing unexpected objects improves the creation of creative solutions – inattentional blindness by children influences divergent thinking negatively

During intense and attention-demanding tasks, the sudden discovery of unexpected objects or solutions is often associated with originality or even creativity. In a general and more scientific context, Sternberg and Lubart (1999) and others defined creativity as "the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful)." This study investigated the influence of inattentional blindness (IB) on creative thinking. The IB paradigm demonstrated that if attention is diverted to another object, observers sometimes fail to notice an unexpected object, even if it is right in front of them. For this project, children were chosen as subjects because recent research from the neurosciences has suggested that stagnation in creative development could occur above 8 years. Children up to the age of around 7 years exhibit the greatest absolute number and density of synapses in the human primary visual cortex, as well as resting glucose uptake in the occipital cortex as measured by PET. These indicators are currently associated with creativity. Therefore, the probability to have great variance in the divergent thinking data was maximized. This study will be the first to examine the link between divergent thinking and IB. Therefore, this investigation expanded the work of Kasof (1997) and others that explored the relationship between different kinds of attention processes and creative performance. According to these previous results, it was assumed that children with higher attention performance (less IB) perform better in terms of divergent thinking. Divergent thinking tests were used because divergent thinking is one of the most studied and most commonly recognized components of the multifaceted phenomenon of the creativity complex. Divergent thinking is not to be interpreted as synonymous with creativity or creative thinking. The role and definition of divergent thinking is now a topic of current discussions. Aus dem Text