Mind wandering outside the box—About the role of off-task thoughts and their assessment during creative incubation.

Abstract

The present study was designed to conceptually replicate and to further test previous findings that have shown a beneficial influence of mind wandering during incubation phases on postincubation divergent-thinking performance. Additionally, online thought probes and the effects their occurrence might have on incubation thought processes were investigated. Participants worked on verbal and figural divergent-thinking tasks. In one condition, their thoughts were probed during an incubation interval, possibly interrupting and/or making aware creative thought processes. Participants in this condition retrospectively reported fewer thoughts concerning the divergent-thinking tasks compared to two other incubation conditions: that is, one without interruption and one interrupted by trivia questions. Divergent thinking did not differ between these three incubation conditions and all three incubation conditions achieved a similar performance as a no-incubation control condition. These results add to the ongoing discussion regarding the relationship between mind wandering and creativity by challenging the idea of mind-wandering states contributing to a creative-incubation process in divergent-thinking tasks.

What are the benefits of mind wandering to creativity?

“…Our studies more closely conceptually replicates Baird et al (2012) relative to Smeekens and Kane (2016) or Steindorf et al (2021) for several reasons. First, neither Smeekens and Kane nor Steindorf et al manipulate proportions of mind wandering during the incubation interval and measure for effects of this manipulation; instead, they used a incubation-difficulty condition looking at predictive relations between proportion of mind wandering during an undemanding incubation-interval task and AUT responses.…”

“…Even here, Smeekens and Kane (2016) failed to find any relation between mind wandering during the incubation-interval and AUT scores. More recently, Steindorf et al (2021) conducted a conceptual replication of the results from Baird et al and Smeekens and Kane. Participants completed both verbal and figural AUTs prior to a 12-min.…”

“…Neither of these are meant to indicate problems with Smeekens and Kane, as their studies examined more general relationships between executive control, working memory, and different forms of creativity, or Steindorf et al who examined the role of different probing techniques on creative performance. Additionally, unlike either Baird et al or Smeekens and Kane, we (a) collected data from a larger sample, (b) explicitly informed participants about the postincubation AUT, which should encourage incubation effects, and; (c) used Bayesian analyses to supplement significance testing (these match aspects of the sampling, design, and analytic approach of Steindorf et al, 2021).…”

A Fresh Look at the Unconscious Thought Effect: Using Mind-Wandering Measures to Investigate Thought Processes in Decision Problems With High Information Load

“…Given that changing probe characteristics can lead to considerable differences in results, one might argue that the mere presence of probes produces similar or even larger discrepancies. As we recently found in our lab ( Steindorf et al, 2020 ), probing participants’ thoughts during an incubation interval within a creativity task resulted in fewer creativity-task-related thoughts (reported retrospectively) compared to not applying any probes or applying trivia probes (cf. present Experiment 3).…”

“…Unexpectedly, we found that the UTE disappeared when we employed thought probes during the filler interval, leading us to assume a detrimental nature of such probes to the processes producing the UTE. It has already been found that changing thought-probe characteristics within mind-wandering experiments can lead to differences in results ( Seli et al, 2013 ; Weinstein et al, 2018 ; Robison et al, 2019 ), which made it reasonable to assume that the mere presence of thought probes might have interfered with (unconscious) thoughts for at least two reasons ( Steindorf et al, 2020 ): One reason could be that thought probes may have interrupted the ongoing task and thereby ongoing (unconscious) thought processes. Alternatively or additionally, thought probes may have made participants more aware of their current states of thought during the distraction task, whereas an absence of thought awareness might be a necessary criterion for an UTE to appear.…”