What makes some people more creative than others? Psychologists have suggested that creativity partly depends on a person's ability to continuously switch attention between the details and the bigger picture of a given task.
In two experiments, Darya Zabelina and Mark Beeman from Northwestern University found evidence for the opposite effect, at least for one measure of creativity: creative people with achievements in the real world may concentrate so much on one aspect that they have difficulty switching to another.
Across two studies, 74 college students were selected from among a large number of students for their extremely high or low scores on a questionnaire about their achievements in creative fields like cooking, science, writing, and music.
Each student was subjected to a series of 128 challenges to quickly (within 1 second) and accurately identify either the details or the larger picture, in alternating sets of trials. This task required persistence, such that participants needed to zoom in on the details for some time before unpredictably zooming out to see the bigger picture (and vice versa), over a series of challenges.
When the researchers accounted for differences in intelligence and reaction speed, creative achievers made significantly more (9% of challenges) mistakes than less creative students (2%).
Higher scores on real-world measure of creativity (but not on divergent thinking task) predicted persistence in the attention task. It appears that the tendency for persistent attention is a defining characteristic of individuals who have achieved noteworthy creative successes, even though this tendency seems to undermine the ability to engage in the type of flexible thinking associated with other measures of creative cognition.
Results thus suggest that people's attentional styles may differ depending on the type of creativity they exhibit.
DOI:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00191