Attentional Perseveration and Openness: The Pathways to Creativity

            There are often discussions about what really drives creative achievement and whether there are ways to measure creativity. Even though many aspects of such talks remain unresolved, recent studies have shown that it is possible to establish a relationship between creative achievement and traits such as attentional persistence and openness.

            In her paper titled Short-term attentional perseveration associated with real-life creative achievement and her talk, Darya Zabelina demonstrates that creative acts relate to increased levels of attentional persistence. Experiments were designed in which participants with high and low real-world creative achievements were asked to identify the hierarchically constructed letters “S” or “H” in the stimuli. For example, the stimuli can contain a large S made of small As (global) and a large A made of small Ss (local). An important aspect of the experiment was that the letters were presented in alternating blocks of eight local trials and eight global trials. This allowed for the testing of participants’ attention in trials with alternating global and local levels of stimuli. The results indicated that participants with high creative achievements made more errors in the trials in which they had to switch their level of attention. Therefore, the study shows that real-world creative acts are at least partially dependent on higher levels of cognitive control and attentional persistence.

            In addition to attentional perseveration, psychologists have concluded that the personality trait that is most consistently relatable to creative achievement is the trait of openness to experience. Essentially, it has been determined that the more open an individual is to experience, the more likely it is for him to perform creative work in his career. In the article titled This Personality Trait Is The Most Important Driver Of Creative Achievement, Scott Barry Kaufman, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and the scientific director of The Imagination Institute, relates the domain of openness to a particular kind of dopamine projection. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that functions as a trigger to exploring our experiences. Individuals with high openness show a positive correlation with dopamine projections.

            In his research, Kaufman discovered that openness could be separated into the four factors: explicit cognitive ability, intellectual engagement, affective engagement, and aesthetic engagement. Individuals with high explicit cognitive ability typically do well on measures of intelligence that pertain to analogical reasoning and working memory. Those with high intellectual engagement indulge themselves in rational thought and searching for truth similar to a scientist. Individuals with high affective engagement are driven by emotions as a poet is. Lastly, those with high aesthetic engagement are motivated by their emotional investment in fantasies and aesthetics as a painter is. The common term “engagement” in the above-mentioned factors illustrates that openness to experience is all about how information activates an individual. Those with high openness to experience love learning new things and are more likely to get into the “state of flow” – a “just-right feeling” where an individual’s skills meet his challenges. Once an individual is “flowing”, he is continually stretching his skill set, which therefore allows for more creative achievement.

            Recent research has provided more insight on the nature of creativity and the manner through which it can be tracked. The above two research findings illustrate that, at the least, people with high creative achievements have increased levels of two vital traits of creativity: attentional preservation and openness to experience. Even though we may not resolve all the aspects of creative achievement due to its subjective nature, these findings provide a deeper understanding of the concept of creativity as whole.

Baer, Drake. “This Personality Triat Is the Most Important Driver of Creative Achievement.” Business Insider. Business Insider, 7 Jul. 2014. Web. 7 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.businessinsider.com/the-personality-trait-that-drives-creative-achievement-2014-7>.

Zabelina, D. L., & Beeman, M. (2013). Short-Term Attentional Perseveration Associated with Real-Life Creative Achievement. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 191. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00191