A wandering mind is not always a creative mind. Anecdotes about ideas spontaneously entering awareness during walks, showers, and other off-task activities are plenty. The science behind it, however, is still inconclusive. Creativity might result from how thought context--whether thoughts are on-task or off-task--relates to thought dynamics--how…

Two experiments examined the dual influence of mind wandering (MW) on the incubation of both deliberate and spontaneous modes of creativity. Specifically, using a modified version of Sustained Attention Response Task as the incubation task, this study assessed whether taking a break from a creative task and engaging in either an MW-allowed task or…

The goal of this study was to examine maladaptive daydreaming and the associations with emotion regulation difficulties, creative processes, creative self-efficacy, and creative personal identity. A non-clinical sample of active participants (N = 361) was investigated. A series of Pearson correlations, multivariate, multilinear regressions, and…

Studies suggest that internally oriented cognitive processes are central to creativity. Here, we distinguish between intentional and unintentional forms of mind wandering and explore their behavioral and neural correlates. We used a sample of 155 healthy adults from the mind-brain-body dataset, all of whom completed resting-state fMRI scans and…

Flow is a state of optimal or peak experience, commonly associated with expert and creative performance. Musicians often experience flow during playing, yet the neural mechanisms underlying this elusive state have remained underexplored due to challenges posed by substantial artefacts in the neural data. Here, we bypassed these issues by focusing…

This experimental research investigates the creativity of anonymous video-based groups through a series of collaborative divergent and convergent thinking stages of innovation. A sample of 113 undergraduate students participated in small groups of three or four to complete a creative problem-solving task in either anonymous or identified…

Increasing research efforts are focused on explaining the cognitive bases of creativity. However, it remains unclear when and how cognitive factors such as intelligence and executive function uniquely contribute to performance on creative thinking tasks. Although a relationship between fluid intelligence (Gf) and creative cognition has been…

Creativity is a valuable attribute that involves the generation of original ideas; attention is a vital function that facilitates information selection. There is some evidence that creative people may have poorer attention and are generally more distracted than others, and this distractibility is thought to enable the production of novel ideas.…

Taking a perception-action perspective, we investigated how the presence of different real objects in children's immediate situation affected their creativity and whether this effect was moderated by their selective attention. Seventy children between ages 9 and 12 years old participated. Verbal responses on a visual Alternative Uses Task with a…

This research investigated the effects of Orff-based attention-enhancing music education programme on impulsive preschool children's cognitive tempo. The research was conducted using a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design. Thirty preschoolers were included in this research; 15 in the experimental and 15 in the control groups.…

Humor is considered an educational method that can be implemented in educational processes with a wide range of educational variables. Examining the scope of research on educational humor has the potential to guide future studies. Therefore, the aim of this study is to show the conceptual trend in humor research in education over the past decade.…

Even if mind wandering (MW) and mindfulness have traditionally been intended as separate and antithetical constructs, the roles of these 2 mental states on creative behavior were jointly explored in this article. In particular, MW was analyzed in light of a recent approach suggesting a differentiation between deliberate and spontaneous MW, whereas…

Prior research has used many variants of "be creative" or brainstorm instructions to enhance creativity in a variety of tasks. However, differences in instruction wording may lead to differences in instruction interpretation, and varying the placement of instructions before or after a written problem description may lead to differences…

How do emerging adults experience mindfulness and compassion? The goals of this study were to (1) evaluate the effectiveness of a mindfulness curricular intervention and (2) examine how students interpreted their experience. We delivered a mindfulness curriculum to 24 college students who meditated twice a week for 7 weeks. Students completed a…

This study explores the effects of immersive VR on an individual's creativity and factors related to creativity including flow, attention and meditation (i.e., mental relaxation or stress). Sixty undergraduate students were invited to participate in an open-ended challenge to design a wearable technology functioning as a smart phone individually,…