Enhancing Verbal Creativity via Brief Interventions During an Incubation Interval

Previous studies revealed inconsistent findings about the effects of cognitively low or high demanding interpolated tasks during incubation period on post-incubation creative performance. To explain this contradiction, two intervention tasks were administered (Reflecting on the generated ideas [RF] and the Word puzzle task [WP]), which are supposed to elicit remote associative processes but with varying levels of cognitive demands, along with two verbal control tasks (phonemic fluency task and object characteristics task). A delayed-incubation paradigm was used to assess whether performance on verbal creative problem solving (Alternative Uses Task, AUT) could be stimulated by the applied intervention tasks. The results showed that only RF and WP tasks, but not the control tasks, were associated with significant incubation effects. The findings suggest that the interpolated tasks that were assumed to elicit remote associative processes can unfold beneficial effects on verbal creative problem solving, regardless of whether the task is cognitively low or high demanding.