Intuition or rationality: Impact of critical thinking dispositions on the cognitive processing of creative information

Creative thinking and critical thinking complement each other and are inseparable. The two fold model theory of creativity believes that the generation of creative thinking includes two processes: concept generation and concept evaluation. Among them, individuals will rely more on non-automatic top-down control processing for cognitive information processing in the process of concept evaluation. Critical thinking belongs to analytical thinking, which focuses on and doubts the information bias in the generation of ideas to restrain. Therefore, this study assumes that the impact of critical thinking on creative thinking will occur in the process of concept evaluation, which is rational judgment rather than intuitive thinking. This study uses event-related potential (ERP) techniques to explore the explicit and implicit mechanisms of cognitive processing of creative information (i.e. role of intuition and rationality) in people with different critical thinking dispositions. The current study includes two experiments. Experiment 1 is an explicit ERP experiment, which uses a priming paradigm to examine the neural mechanisms underlying the explicit processing of creative information by individuals with different critical thinking dispositions. Experiment 2 is an implicit ERP experiment, which uses an alternative Stroop paradigm to examine the neural mechanisms underlying the implicit processing of creative information. Results found that the brain mechanisms of explicit cognition of creative information differed significantly across critical thinking dispositions. For low-critical thinking dispositions, low-creative characters evoked larger N1 waves than high-creative characters initiation conditions. For high-critical thinking dispositions, high-creative words evoked larger P2 waves than low-creative words. However, implicit cognition did not differ significantly. This result suggests that the cognitive processing of creative information by different critical thinkers is a rational thought process. The N1 and P2 components, which are indicators of cognitive sensitivity to creative information, can be used as markers to distinguish among different critical thinking dispositions.