Contributions of Metacognition to Creative Performance and Behavior

Abstract

How are ideas born? Contrary to commonly held beliefs, creative performance, like any goal‐oriented action, requires understanding and managing one's own cognitive processes – thus, efficient metacognition. Recently, a systematic framework of creative metacognition (CMC) has been proposed, assuming the relevance of metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, and control in creative performance. Here, we provide the first comprehensive empirical examination of this conception. Specifically, an online sample (N = 425) performed divergent thinking (DT) tasks and gave insight in relevant aspects of metacognitive processes during task performance. The study revealed that all three proposed components of CMC played independent roles in enhancing creative cognitive performance, including divergent thinking creativity and fluency. Among these components, metacognitive control showed the strongest positive association with creative cognitive performance. As expected, CMC was especially relevant to imminent creative task performance but showed some association with real‐life creativity. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that all three postulated components of CMC support creative performance and, to a lesser degree, to creative behavior. In the discussion, we delve deeper into the specific roles of these metacognitive subcomponents in enhancing creative cognitive performance and touch upon the differences between the roles of self‐regulation and metacognition in creativity.