Cognitive Flexibility Influences Divergent Thinking in Adolescence

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adaptively shift between mental sets. This comprises abilities like task-switching, set shifting and efficient responding to error feedback. Divergent thinking includes the generation of creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. Both cognitive capacities go through refinement from childhood to adulthood, with adolescence being one of the important periods when they go through most of the changes. This study examined cognitive flexibility in a large sample of adolescents (N = 344) and its influence in divergent thinking. Our results indicate that cognitive flexibility significantly contributes to divergent thinking, surpassing the effects of abstract reasoning and working memory and suggesting a major role for cognitive flexibility in this form of creativity. These findings have implications for how creativity is nurtured in the classroom, and how methods of teaching and learning could evolve to assist students to create novel solutions to complex problems.