Thursday, November 19, 2026
18:30-20:00 GMT (London, UK) • 1:30-3:00pm EST (North America, Eastern)
This month, we’ll dive into the roles of and relationship between mind wandering and working memory in shaping creative thinking.
In their paper, Yang et al. (20261) explore creative task performance between participants with different levels of mind-wandering and working memory capacity. While overall creativity did not differ between groups, the researchers found interesting differences in how task switching and idea generation vary across ways of thinking.
Join our upcoming discussion to explore how different cognitive profiles affect not whether but how we develop creative ideas!
📄 Yang, Chen, Wu, & Hou (2024)
Yang, T., Chen, Y., Wu, G., & Hou, Y. (2024). Free but controlled mind creates through reference: The role of shifting and idea referencing in individuals with different working memory and mind wandering profiles. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 20(3), 609.
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This study employed a person-centered approach to examine the working memory capacity (WMC) and mind wandering (MW) profiles among college students. Latent profile analyses (N = 159) identified three profiles: high-WMC–high-MW, low-WMC–low-MW, and high-WMC–low-MW. The study further explored the relationship between task item shifting, idea referencing, and creative outcomes within a two-item alternative uses task across different WMC–MW profiles. Using the novel measure of reference in the two-item alternative uses task, our study discovered a distinctive creative process among the three identified profiles: students with a high-WMC–high-MW profile can draw inspiration from one another while shifting between two creative tasks, ultimately facilitating the generation of creative ideas.
👋🏼 Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need a pdf of the article.