The Link between working memory capacity and ability to think creatively

Abstract

To be capable of thinking creatively, a person must absorb information (such as form, shape, sound, etc) via one or more of the senses, and then reinterpret this information to form a novel idea, or an image in their minds. This task requires them to suppress their initial interpretations of the information that has entered through the senses, and rework the information into something new. As this task is performed in the mind, it requires a mental workspace in which the information can be manipulated in order to produce new ideas (just as an architect would require a drawing board to sketch his ideas). The study reported in this paper is an investigation into the role of working memory in supporting, and in constraining, the ability to think creatively. In order to ascertain whether there was a link between working memory capacity and ability to think creatively, and also to determine the nature of such a link, a total of thirty participants (twelve male, eighteen female) were individually presented with three tests designed to indicate their working memory capacity (namely, sentence span, digit span, and word span), and then asked to complete a mental synthesis task comprising of ten trials (devised as a measure of their ability to think creatively) in which their task was to mentally construct an image from sets of presented alphanumeric and geometric shape/ characters. The results of the present study showed that participants’ scores on the tests of working memory capacity were positively correlated to their scores on the mental synthesis task. In other words, those participants with greater working memory capacity seemed to show greater ability to think creatively then those with lower working memory capacities