Mind Wandering Outside the Box-About the Role of Off-Task Thoughts and Their Assessment During Creative Incubation

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.

Automated summary

The study aimed to test the positive effects of mind wandering during incubation phases on subsequent divergent-thinking performance, and to investigate the impact of online thought probes on incubation thought processes. Results showed that participants reported fewer task-related thoughts in the condition with thought probes, but divergent thinking performance did not significantly differ between the different incubation conditions.