Abstract
Previous studies have already suggested that the deliberate nature of Mind-Wandering (MW) is critical for promoting creative performance. However, the deliberate nature of MW may be mixed up with task-relatedness. Whether the deliberate nature or task-relatedness of MW is responsible for such positive influence remains unclear. The present study tried to address this issue by investigating the influence of deliberate MW (MW-d) and task-related MW (MW-r) on post-incubation creative performance. Our result showed that MW-d is positively correlated with MW-r and spontaneous MW (MW-s) is highly positively correlated with task-unrelated MW (MW-u). Meanwhile, after controlling the possible confounding variables (i.e., the pre-incubation creative performance, the performance during distraction task, and motivation on creative ideation), both MW-d and MW-r predicted participants’ AUT performance after incubation. However, the prediction model based on MW-r was stable while the MW-d-based prediction model was not. These findings indicate that the task-relatedness of MW, instead of its deliberate nature, might have a positive influence on subsequent creative performance.
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This study was funded by the Humanity and Social Science Youth Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China (22XJC190001); the Natural Science Basic Research Program of Shaanxi (2022JQ-156); and the Shaanxi Provincial Research Project on Major Theoretical and Practical Issues in Philosophy and Social Sciences.
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Cong Xie declares that he has no conflict of interest. Yadan Li declares that she has no conflict of interest. Yilong Yang declares that he has no conflict of interest. Ying Du declares that she has no conflict of interest. Chunyu Liu declares that she has no conflict of interest.
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Xie, C., Li, Y., Yang, Y. et al. What’s behind deliberation? The effect of task-related mind-wandering on post-incubation creativity. Psychological Research 87, 2158–2170 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01793-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01793-0